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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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FOREWORD
This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet. I wish he had seen it to completion—not because it would have been a better book in his hands, more realized and more generous and more shapely, or because it would have more closely resembled him and the form he had in mind for this offering to his readers, but because it was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end. In the difficult period in which he was composing it, he would send “do not disturb” e-mails to the few of us who would regularly drop by. He renewed his commitment to rigorous meditation so as to focus his mind through the acute pain of multiple compression fractures and the weakening of his body. He often remarked to me that, through all the strategies of art and living that he had employed during his rich and complicated life, he wished that he had more completely stayed steadfast to the recognition that writing was his only solace, his truest purpose.
My father, before he was anything else, was a poet. He regarded this vocation, as he records in the notebooks, as some “mission from G-d.” (The hyphen indicated his reverence to the deity; his reluctance to write out the divine name, even in English, is an old Jewish custom and is further evidence of the fidelity that he mixed with his freedom.) “Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money … nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.” This statement of purpose was also a statement of regret: he offered his literary consecration as an explanation for what he felt was poor fatherhood, failed relationships, and inattention to his finances and health. I am reminded of one of his lesser-known songs (and one of my favorites): “I came so far for beauty, I left so much behind.” But not far enough, apparently: in his view he hadn’t left enough. And this book, he knew, was to be his last offering.
As a kid, when I would ask my dad for money to buy sweets at the corner store, he’d often tell me to search the pockets of his blazer for loose bills or change. Invariably, I would find a notebook while going through his pockets. Later in life, when I would ask him if he had a lighter or matches, I would open drawers and find pads of paper and notebooks. Once, when I asked him if he had any tequila, I was directed to the freezer, where I found a frosty, misplaced notebook. Indeed, to know my father was (among many other wondrous things) to know a man with papers, notebooks, and cocktail napkins—a distinguished handwriting on each—scattered (neatly) everywhere. They came from nightstands in hotels, or from 99-cent stores; the ones that were gilded, leather-bound, fancy, or otherwise had a look of importance were never used. My father preferred humble vessels. By the early 1990s, there were storage lockers filled with boxes of his notebooks, notebooks containing a life of dedication to the thing that most defined the man. Writing was his reason for being. It was the fire he was tending to, the most significant flame he fueled. It was never extinguished.
There are many themes and words that repeat throughout my father’s work: frozen, broken, naked, fire, and flame. On the back of the first album cover are (as he put it in a later song) the “flames that follow Joan of Arc.” “Who by fire?” he famously asked, in a song about fate that wickedly made use of a Jewish prayer. “I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me.” That candle was only the first of many kindlings. There are fires and flames, for creation and destruction, for heat and light, for desire and consummation, throughout his work. He lit the flames and he tended to them diligently. He studied and recorded their consequences. He was stimulated by their danger—he often spoke of other people’s art as not having enough “danger,” and he praised the “excitement of a thought that was in flames.”
This fiery preoccupation lasted until the very end. “You want it darker, we kill the flame,” he intoned on his last album, his parting album. He died on November 7, 2016. It feels darker now, but the flame was not killed. Each page of paper that he blackened was lasting evidence of a burning soul.
—Adam Cohen, February 2018
EDITORIAL NOTE
In the last months of his life, despite severe physical limitations, Leonard Cohen made selections for what would be his final volume of poems. The Flame presents this work in a format that his editors, Professors Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano, and his longtime Canadian publisher believe reflects Leonard’s intentions, based on the manuscript that he compiled, and using stylistic choices he made for previous books as a guide. Robert Faggen began the project working closely with Leonard, and Alexandra Pleshoyano joined to assist with completion of the editing in April 2017. Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, suggested the title.
Leonard provided clear instructions for the organization of the book, which was to contain written work and a generous sampling of his drawings and self-portraits. He envisioned three sections. The first section contains sixty-three poems that he had carefully selected, chosen from a trove of unpublished work that spans decades. Leonard was known to work on his poems for many years—sometimes many decades—before they were published; he considered these sixty-three poems completed works.
The second section contains the poems that became lyrics from his last four albums. All the lyrics for Leonard’s songs begin as poems, and thus they can be appreciated as poems in their own right more than those of most songwriters. Notably, Leonard has published some of his lyrics as poems in the New Yorker prior to release of the album on which the song containing the lyrics appears. This was true most recently for “Steer Your Way,” and previously for “A Street,” “Almost Like the Blues,” and “Going Home.” In presenting the lyrics of Anjani Thomas’s album Blue Alert (2006), produced by Leonard, and Leonard’s Old Ideas (2012), Popular Problems (2014), and You Want It Darker (2016), we have followed the formatting which Leonard used in his book of selected poems and songs, Stranger Music (1993), which featured many lyrics. Careful readers will note differences between how these poems appear in The Flame and how the lyrics appear in the lyrics accompanying the albums.
The third section of the book presents a selection of entries from Leonard’s notebooks, which he kept on a daily basis from his teenage years up until the last day of his life. Robert Faggen supervised the transcription of more than three thousand pages of notebooks that span six decades. Though Leonard participated in the selection of notebook entries for The Flame, he did not specify a final order. It would be challenging—if not impossible—to proceed chronologically because Leonard would often work in the same notebooks over many years with various coloured inks showing the different entries. Leonard numbered the notebooks in a system that we do not understand. That said, we chose to follow the numerical order of the notebooks even if these are apparently not always chronological. These notebook selections include a variety of stanzas and lines—what Leonard once called “scraps”—and readers familiar with Leonard’s work will often see entries that appear to be working drafts of poems and lyrics. No attempt has been made to form a definitive narrative between these notebooks, and the entries
have been reproduced here as closely as possible to the way they appear in the notebooks themselves, with no attempts made to change punctuation or line breaks. In transcribing the notebook entries, we followed certain conventions, and the following symbols are used in listing variants: {} indicates a word or phrase written above or below the line; [?] indicates an illegible word or phrase; and *** indicates a break between notebook entries.
In addition to these three sections of the book, Leonard wished to publish his acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award, given in Spain on October 21, 2011. Elsewhere we are including—courtesy of Leonard’s friend and colleague Peter Scott—one of Leonard’s last e-mail exchanges, written less than twenty-four hours before his passing.
Leonard had suggested that some of his self-portraits and drawings be included, a practice that he began in Book of Longing (2006). Since Leonard did not have the chance to make these selections, Alexandra Pleshoyano chose nearly seventy self-portraits from more than 370 that he created, along with twenty-four drawings from his artwork. Leonard also agreed that we could reproduce some of the notebook pages to illustrate the book; twenty such selections are included here.
Finally, a few notes on individual poems. The poem “Full Employment” is essentially a longer version of the poem “G-d Wants His Song.” The similarity between the poem “The Lucky Night” and the poem “Drank a Lot” is also worth noting. The poem “Undertow” was released as a song on Leonard’s album Dear Heather (2004). The poem “Never Gave Nobody Trouble” was also released as a song on Leonard’s live album Can’t Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour (2015). The poems “A Street” and “Thanks for the Dance” are presented in slightly different versions as lyrics in the second part of the book. Those familiar with the Leonard Cohen Files website, hosted by Jarkko Arjatsalo, will recognize a few poems, self-portraits, and drawings, which had been posted there with Leonard’s permission.
Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano
July 2018
POEMS
HAPPENS TO THE HEART
I was always working steady
But I never called it art
I was funding my depression
Meeting Jesus reading Marx
Sure it failed my little fire
But it’s bright the dying spark
Go tell the young messiah
What happens to the heart
There’s a mist of summer kisses
Where I tried to double-park
The rivalry was vicious
And the women were in charge
It was nothing, it was business
But it left an ugly mark
So I’ve come here to revisit
What happens to the heart
I was selling holy trinkets
I was dressing kind of sharp
Had a pussy in the kitchen
And a panther in the yard
In the prison of the gifted
I was friendly with the guard
So I never had to witness
What happens to the heart
I should have seen it coming
You could say I wrote the chart
Just to look at her was trouble
It was trouble from the start
Sure we played a stunning couple
But I never liked the part
It ain’t pretty, it ain’t subtle
What happens to the heart
Now the angel’s got a fiddle
And the devil’s got a harp
Every soul is like a minnow
Every mind is like a shark
I’ve opened every window
But the house, the house is dark
Just say Uncle, then it’s simple
What happens to the heart
I was always working steady
But I never called it art
The slaves were there already
The singers chained and charred
Now the arc of justice bending
And the injured soon to march
I lost my job defending
What happens to the heart
I studied with this beggar
He was filthy he was scarred
By the claws of many women
He had failed to disregard
No fable here no lesson
No singing meadowlark
Just a filthy beggar blessing
What happens to the heart
I was always working steady
But I never called it art
I could lift, but nothing heavy
Almost lost my union card
I was handy with a rifle
My father’s .303
We fought for something final
Not the right to disagree
Sure it failed my little fire
But it’s bright the dying spark
Go tell the young messiah
What happens to the heart
June 24, 2016
I DO
I do, I love you Mary
More than I can say
Cuz if I ever said it
They’d take us both away
They’d lock us up for nothing
And throw away the key
The world don’t like us Mary
They’re on to you and me
We got a minute Mary
Before they pull the plug
50 seconds maybe
You know that’s not enough
30 seconds baby
Is all we got to love
And if they catch us laughing
They gonna rough us up
I do, I love you Mary
More than I can say
Cuz if I ever said it
They’d take us both away
They’d lock us up for nothing
And throw away the key
The world don’t like us Mary
They’re on to you and me
LAMBCHOPS
thinking of those lambchops
at Moishe’s the other night
we all taste good to one another
most bodies are good to eat
even reptiles and insects
even the poisonous lutefisk of Norway
buried in the dirt a million years before serving
and the poisonous blowfish of Japan
can be prepared
to insure reasonable risks
at the table
if the crazy god did not want us to eat one another
why make our flesh so sweet
I heard it on the radio
a happy rabbit at the rabbit farm
saying to the animal psychic
don’t be sad
it’s lovely here
they’re so good to us
we’re not the only ones
said the rabbit
comforting her
everyone gets eaten
as the rabbit said
to the animal psychic
2006
NO TIME TO CHANGE
No time to change
The backward look
It’s much too late
My gentle book
Too late to make
The men ashamed
For what they do
With naked flames
Too late to fall
Upon my sword
I have no sword
It’s 2005
How dare I care
What’s on my plate
O gentle book
You’re much too late
You missed the point
Of poetry
It’s all about them
Not about me
I DIDN’T KNOW
I knew that I was weak
I knew that you were strong
I did not dare to kneel
Where I did not belong
And if I meant to touch
Your beauty with my hand
Then come the boils and blood
Which I would understand
You tore
your knees apart
The loneliness revealed
That drew this unborn heart
From chains that would not yield
But weakened by your exercise
You fell against my soul
The stricken soul the mind denies
Until you make it whole
So I can love your beauty now
Though seeming from afar
Until my neutral world allow
How intimate you are
Sometimes it gets so lonely
I don’t know what to do
I’d trade my stash of boredom
For a little hit of you
I didn’t know
I didn’t know
I didn’t know
How much you needed me
I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE
O apple of the world
we weren’t married on the surface
we were married at the core
I can’t take it anymore
surely there must be
a limit for the rich
and a hope unto the poor
I can’t take it anymore
and the lies that they tell
about G-d
as if they owned the store
I can’t take it anymore
UNDERTOW
I set out one night
When the tide was low
There were signs in the sky
But I did not know
I’d be caught in the grip
Of the undertow
And ditched on a beach
Where the sea hates to go
With a child in my arms
And a chill in my soul
And my heart the shape
Of a begging bowl
ON RARE OCCASIONS
On rare occasions
the power was given me
to send waves of emotion
through the world.
These were impersonal events,
over which I had no control.
I climbed on the outdoor stage
as the sun was going down
behind the Tower of Toledo
and the people did not let me go
until the middle of the night.