This morning on the front page of The Boston Globe there was an article about Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah. There’s a buzz about the song at the moment started by a kid who sang it on American Idol. After that people started looking it up on YouTube and seeing incredible versions by Jeff Buckley and John Cale. And Leonard has just been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This song, true poetry that evokes worlds of sublime feeling, has become a living and growing thing. It didn’t make a splash when it was first released and I don’t think it’s an accident that, in this time of sorrow and challenge for the planet, it opens up those feelings which we need to take radical good action. It’s also a fine thing that Leonard, who I read had lost a great deal of money to an unscrupulous manager, will reap bountiful and deserved rewards.

So, I wanted to write that this morning here. Then I went to google to fetch a photo of Leonard to adorn this post only to discover that he is doing a world tour starting in May! I saw Montreal on the list and without a moment’s hesitation snatched two tickets for his last show at Place des Arts. Five minutes later it was sold out! It’s beyond a dream. I’ve never seen him sing and to see him in his city and mine will be so, so poignant.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old and I can say I’ve been writing seriously now for twenty years. I’ve not tried very hard to publish, that is coming—it’s important too, but most important is the journey words take us on and what discipline and the practice yields. And Leonard has been an inspiration since I was seventeen years old.

In my last year of high school I had a brilliant, literate English teacher, Doc Smith, who took us through a four inch thick text from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot. We memorized and wrote poetry, we wrote satires, short stories, essays. We had debates. And we walked around saying —

“I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.”

One day my friend Lindley Shantz and I went to a café on Rue de la Montagne in Montreal. We both wanted to write ‘the great Canadian novel,’ which was a joke because at that time Canadian novels were not considered great. (Times change and thanks to the Canadian government for its support of the arts!) Canadians back then had a bit of an inferiority complex—our neighbors to the south were so glitzy, so it. We two girls were trying to hold our heads high and Rue de la Montagne, then called Mountain Street, was the place to be. When we exited the café that day Leonard Cohen was coming out of the bar next door, a place we were too young to get into. He was in a black leather coat and we trailed him for a block or so, clinging onto each other, our hearts flipping like fish.

Later, at McGill, I got to study English with the incomparable Louis Dudek who got us to read the world into a text. He was Leonard’s teacher too. All these years I’ve loved Leonard’s words and his music and loved his devotion to art.  That man has been an inspiration.  I feel so lucky that I now get to see him in the city where it all started.

That’s Leonard’s own design of the interlinked hearts, by the way, and his drawing too.

March 14th, 2008 | Category: Spotted / Art on the Planet | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL