Upstaging Toronto in the 40's & 50's, Montreal became Canada's centre for modern poetry; even though most of the publishing houses remained in Toronto. Two small, lively Montreal literary journals during the war years heralded the coming of age of modern poetry in Canada: Preview and First Statement. Preview was founded by a group of five anti-fascist writers: Patrick Anderson, F.R. Scott, Margaret Day, Bruce Ruddick and Neufville Shaw. Though P.K. Page and A.M. Klein joined the group later, the dominant influence was Patrick Anderson, an immigrant from England and a new force in Montreal in 1940. First published as a mimeographed bulletin, Preview's mandate was militant engagement and socialist commitment, "a possible fusion between lyric and didactic elements in modern verse, a combination of vivid, arresting imagery and the capacity to sing with social content and criticism" (from its opening editorial). Monroe Beattie argues, "the editors affirmed their belief in international ideologies and literary standards...they had lived long enough in Canada to realize the narrowness of Canadian subject-matter hitherto and, on the whole, the conventionality of Canadian verse" (LH, vol 2, 279).
First Statement: A Magazine for Young Canadian Writers was co-founded by Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, and John Sutherland, partially in competition with Preview, with what Sutherland described as "Preview's alleged cosmopolitanism." Sutherland argued that such' cosmopolitanism' was just another name for colonialism (Pacey, LH, vol. 2, 15). Desmond Pacey asserts that what John Sutherland wanted for First Statement was: "a poetry that has stopped being a parasite on other literatures and has the courage to decide its own problems in its own way." Sutherland published poems less metaphysically difficult and more direct in their reflection of the Canadian scene. The first poets First Statesman introduced were Irving Layton, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster. Sutherland, Beattie claims, was a "wretched poet", but an excellent editor. He was "the most stimulating and least inhibited of Canadian editors and critics".
Sutherland became the dominant voice of First Statement and, when it was merged in 1946, with Preview, these two little magazines formed the Northern Review. Sutherland remained editor, until his death in 1956 and by all accounts, Northern Review was better than both, publishing not only poetry, but also fiction and important critical essays.
While AJM Smith lit up the mainstream Canadian scene in the 1920's, Sutherland was intent on introducing the "other" Canadians, the poets outside of Smith's canon. What is referred to as his appendix to Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry 1943, Sutherland's Other Canadians: An Anthology of the New Poetry in Canada 1940-1946 included not only Layton and Dudek, but also Miriam Waddington, Margaret Avison, Patrick Anderson, and James Reaney.
Montreal was an undeniable force of Canadian poetry in the 1950's housing seminal poets such as Phyllis Webb and Leonard Cohen.
Irving Layton (1912-)
Some readers, no doubt, are wondering what a woman poet in the year 2002 will wish to say about Irving Layton. It is not always easy to be neutral about Layton. However, one might think of a quotation from Horace, from 'The Mad Poet' in Ars Poetica: "Men (and women) of sense are afraid to touch a mad poet and give him a wide berth. He's like a man suffering from a nasty itch, or the jaundice, or fanaticism, or Diana's wrath." If Canadians have a category for mad poets, Irving Layton would be a founding member. This was an image, indeed, that he cultivated.
Layton's conceits were meant to shock and induce wrangling. He found pleasure in being outrageous. For some of his readers, however, his was the last fling of a decadent age. Never again would male poets speak from Layton's frame of mind. Layton's blatant patriarchal posturing marginalized him before the turn of the 21st century. And in a sense, this is pity, as there are poems that well deserve reading.
Ironically, in the 60's and 70's, when Layton was publishing with McClelland and Stewart (having offended Ryerson Press with his obscene language), he not only won the Governor General's award, but his books enjoyed wider sales than any other Canadian poet's. Although many of the poems in this period are considered his best, his reputation too sold his books. His popularity was also affected by the fact that Layton was a prolific poet, writing 30 collections. Still, as some of his critics argue, Layton was not discriminating in his editing, publishing seemingly everything he wrote, and consequently some of the poems he published are second-rate. Eventually, the second-rate poems, especially the doggerel in which he boasts of his sexual feats, employ sexual bravado and bombast merely to shock, and attacks other Canadian poets, came to undermine some of his readers' willingness to take him seriously. And they drifted away.
David Stouck suggests that Layton was, while generally chauvinist, generous to individual women. One of the examples he notes is the poem 'Keine Lazarovitch', written on the death of Layton's mother. Stouck sees this poem as written in praise. But Layton's troubled relationship with women - he had five wives! - is revealed even in this poem. Layton grew up in a Montreal slum with a father who by Layton's own account was "an ineffectual visionary" who spent his time in a bedroom of their tenement reading and meditating. It fell to his mother to support the family. She ran a small grocery. In Layton's poem, he describes her as fierce, mean and unaccommodating, strange praise. One wonders if Layton isn't torn between wanting to look to his father for role definition, yet finding more in common with his mother, who, like Layton, has a powerful personality, a strong will, and an intense drive. The poem acknowledges these traits that they shared, but it remains not a poem of praise. It is, instead, a deeply felt poem of grief, an elegy that speaks of much more than his mother's death.
Many of Layton's poems reveal his vision of himself. Like the male salmon in 'The Swimmer' he is "stunned by the memory of lost gills/he frames gestures of self-absorption." Even in 'The Bull Calf,' arguably his best poem, there is a sense, in the last stanza, that like Margaret in the poem 'Spring and Fall' by Gerald Manly Hopkins, he weeps for himself - a dying breed. The poem begins very much like a Frost poem, with a picture of the bull calf and the story of its fate:
The thing could barely stand. Yet taken From his mother and the barn smells he still impressed with his pride, with the promise of sovereignty in the way his head moved to take us in. The fierce sunlight tugging the maize from the ground licked at his shapely flanks. He was too young for all that pride.
This is a lovely, tender image, held until the farmer admits that there is no money in bull calves, and kills it with a mallet. Pride here is the dominant value: the calf is full of pride, then too young for pride, and finally," bereft of pride and so beautiful/ now/without movement, perfectly still in the cool pit/I turned away and wept". It is not too much of a stretch to read the poet into the image of the bull calf.
The critics have been generous to Layton, giving him the benefit of the doubt, but he was less than fully reciprocal, full of pride and invective, condemning his fellow poets, critics, academics, churchmen, and indeed anyone who opposed him. He saw this posture as protest, as "dis-ease in the world", a world that he saw as repressed sexually and especially, in the later poems, repressed by an institutionalised Christianity that had lost the humanity and creativity of Christ. Frances Mansbridge argues that Layton's poetry "is very much a poetry of statement...much of his work and his poetic stance is reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets bringing inspired messages to the people. His roots are more in Isaiah and William Blake than in any 20th century writer" (LH 104).
Layton was born Israel Lazarovitch, in Tirgul Neamt, Romania. His family moved to Montreal the following year, in 1913. Dudek reports that Layton was a reputedly good street fighter who grew up in the tough Main Street sector of Montreal (Poetry of our Time, p. 250). He completed his BSc in agriculture at MacDonald College, served in the army during WWII, and in 1946 completed a Masters degree in political economy at McGill. During the 1940's Layton was a core member of the literary journal First Statement with Louis Dudek and John Sutherland. He taught in a small school in Montreal for many years, lectured part time at George Williams, and taught at York University in Toronto. In 1959 Layton won the Governor General's Award for poetry, for his collection Red Carpet to the Sun.
One wants to like Layton; we want to champion the irrepressible nature, the passion, the acts of protest. But he is too self-destructive for this, as his memoir, Waiting for the Messiah, reveals. BW Powe argues in a review for Books in Canada (Nov., 1985) that on the one hand Layton believes deeply that the writer must provoke, must be dangerous, must oppose his time; on the other hand Layton also believes that no one should criticize Layton. As Powe goes on to say, "the cost of Layton's insular lack of self-awareness, his inability to see what effect he has, has resulted in the self delusions that emerge in the memoir"(18).
Nor should Layton have published Engagement: the Prose of Irving Layton which is described by Robert Fulford (Books, Montreal Star, 18/11/72) as "at once the most interesting and one of the most appalling of recent Canadian books." It is appalling, in Fulford's mind, "because it brings us the ego of Irving Layton in a pure state, unadulterated by the poetic process." For Fulford, Engagement's compilation of prefaces, articles and letters did Layton no good even while it fed the public's fascination with the poet's persona.
Wayne Frances, one of Layton's biographers, asks us to remember Layton as history remembers Lord Byron, as one who was also arrogant, venomous towards his fellow poets, critics and anyone who opposed him, and who also believed that anything he wrote was worth publishing. Frances asks us to remember Layton for his best poems. My own sense favours Layton's poems that are most Frost-like, that are narrative yet lyrical, with an elegance of language and mastery of rhythm, poems with emotional intensity within a formal stanzaic pattern, poems like 'The Birth of Tragedy', 'Berry Picking', and 'Boys in October'. Layton's best poems are about suffering, where his intense energy is directed toward compassion for living things. As the final stanza in 'The Birth of Tragedy' reads:
A quiet madman, never far from tears, I lie like a slain thing under the green air the trees inhabit, or rest upon a chair towards which the inflammable air tumbles on many robins' wings; noting how seasonably leaf and blossom uncurl and living things arrange their death, while someone from afar off blows birthday candles for the world.
What are we to do with Layton? A Governor General's Award winner, in 1976 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 1982 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in poetry. He published over 40 books of poetry and prose. He played a leading role in the production of First Statement and helped shape modern poetry in Canada. For a time he was the most widely read and discussed poet in Canada. Dudek states that he protested "conformity, Calvinism, prudery, and plain dullness with a direct fury and passion unequalled by any Canadian past or present" (Poetry of our Time, 250). Layton describes Canadians in 'From Colony to Nation' as a dull people enamoured of childish games, "deferring to beadle and censor/ not ashamed for this/ but given over to horseplay/ and making money/ a dull people, without charm/ or ideas." Well, perhaps this is direct, and even a poem full of passion, but wherein lies its truth? What, really, is Layton's insight; what really is his intention?
I believe there are important lessons to be learned from Layton: that poets must be tireless critics of their own work, and that we owe a deep respect to not only the craft and art of poetry, but also to the trust given to us to voice the truth. Layton gambled and won in the short run; but art's audience is fickle. Perhaps, nonetheless, his best poems will survive the test of time.
Selected Titles: Red Carpet to the Sun (1959) GG
Louis Dudek (1918-)
Louis Dudek is a poet, editor, teacher, publisher, translator and critic. His parents emigrated from Poland before WWII, and Dudek grew up in the French East End of Montreal. He graduated from McGill in 1939, and then studied at Columbia University in New York, starting a MA in history but transferring to English literature. In 1944 he was included in a collection entitled Unit of Five, which included the work of Raymond Souster, PK Page, James Wreford and Ronald Humbleton, who also served as editor. In 1946, Dudek published his first solo collection, East of the City, setting the work in his childhood. In 1951, he joined the faculty of McGill, lecturing in modern poetry. He remained on faculty as Greenshields Professor of English until 1984, when he became Professor Emeritus. As a critic, teacher and theoretician, Dudek influenced the teaching of Canadian poetry in most schools and universities.
Dudek is best known for his participation in the modern poetry movement in Montreal in the 1940's. He was not only a founding member of First Statement, but also editor of Contact Press, and subsequently editor of other important small literary journals such as Delta, Contact and CIV/n. He was awarded the Quebec Literary Award in 1968, the Order of Canada in 1984, and has received many honorary degrees.
Munroe Beattie, in a Literary History, is quite critical of Dudek's talent. Like Layton, Munroe argues, Dudek is not critical enough of his own work. He also sees shortcomings in the poems that merely describe the observations of 'the scanning eye'; that is, poems that are about what the scanning eye sees. Beattie feels that these poems fall short, that poetry should develop these observations with connections, commentary, narrative movement, something that offers more substance, that combines an 'elaborating mind' with the 'scanning eye'. Beattie recommends Dudek's long poems Europe and En Mexico plus The Transparent Sea as his most successful books because they have a greater range of scenes, moods and subjects, and best achieve expansion and development within a unifying framework. As much as one might agree with Beattie that a poem must be more than the initial observation, his criticism is a little odd given Dudek's dedication to modern verse and its precepts.
We can see the imagist influence in poems such as "A Street in April", where the Canadian winter dominates and we are given "this February street in April/ where not a flower blossoms" and "a dove gleaming and vocal with peace/ fly over them, when his sudden wings stirred; and cast the trembling shadow of a metal bird;/ so April's without flower, and no song heard." In "From a Library Window" Dudek compares the reality of the physical world to the realities of a book (perhaps representing history, intellectual activity, or simply the abstract) through a tennis match. The final stanza reads:
At this distance, closed in glass shelves
leaning against each other, the realities
past and present are easy
dispersed on a level plane, in an order of line, under the
rule of play;
but we miss the muscle wrenched from the thigh,
the eye slit by the sun racing the pin ball.
and the active brain broken by fight and defeat.Many of Dudek's poems depend upon vivid, concrete images, but none so much, perhaps, than "Coming Suddenly to the Sea" a poem that expresses his first encounter with the Atlantic, at 28 years of age. At first he can see nothing but sand, "and burning bits of mother-of-pearl":
And then I saw the spray smashing the rocks
and the angry gulls cutting the air,
and the heads of fish and the hands of crabs on stones:
the carnivorous sea, sower of life,
battering a granite rock to make it a pebble -
love and pity needless as the ferny froth on its long smooth waves.
The sea, with its border of crinkly weed,
the inverted Atlantic of our unstable planet
froze me into a circle of marble, sending the icy air out in
lukewarm waves,
And so I brought home, as an emblem of that day
ending my long blind years, a fistful of blood-red weed in
my hand.George Woodcock (LH vol. 3) is more generous than Beattie towards Dudek. He recommends Dudek's Collected Poems (1971) because the collection "adds to the earlier separate volumes by giving a dramatic overview of Dudek as a humane and thoughtful poet, dedicated to the modernist ideal and supported by an austere pride of craft and vision that had prevented him from ever wooing popular acclaim" (310). Whereas Beattie sees Dudek as limited in scope and tone, tied to the speaking voice, Woodcock sees these same attributes as a dedication to the modernist ideal.
Dudek is also a diligent critic of Canadian letters. He edited anthologies such as The Poetry of Our Time, translated Quebec poetry, and wrote many critical reviews and articles. In the late 70's and early 80's he published three critical collections of essays. Barry Cameron states, "these essays share Sutherland's social realist stance; they assume that literature is the product of experience, favour mimesis, and accept criticism as a mode of interpreting empirical reality (LH vol 4 115).
Louis Dudek continues to be a measured, authoritative voice in Canadian letters.
Selected Titles: Infinite Words: The Poetry of Louis Dudek edited by Robin Blazer(1988); The Poetry of Louis Dudek. Definitive Edition (1998).
Phyllis Webb (1927-)
Phyllis Webb is one of Canada's most elusive, complex and intellectual poets. Born in Victoria, BC in 1927, she studied English and philosophy at the University of BC, and began writing in an off-campus writing group lead by Earle Birney. It is interesting to note that Webb graduated from a private boarding school, and entered university in 1945, the same year that many war veterans also entered university, having been given a choice between a house or a university degree. It was an atmosphere alive with debate about politics, economics and social issues. At 17, Webb turned to politics; eventually, she became the youngest candidate of the CCF party. It was at CCF conference in Vancouver that she met the poet F.R. Scott, who was to have a profound impact on her life.
In the 1950's, Webb was a vital part of the Montreal writing scene, a multi-generational group that included Scott, John Sutherland, Louis Dudek, the Laytons, Miriam Waddington, Eli Mandel, Gael Turnball, and later, Leonard Cohen and Al Purdy. Webb admits in an interview that she didn't take herself seriously as a poet until F.R. Scott and the other established poets took her seriously. The group provided her both encouragement and access to publishing.
In the late 50's, Webb was awarded a Canadian Government Overseas grant that allowed her to spend a year and a half in Paris. In the early 1960's she was a teaching assistant at UBC, and then moved to Toronto to become the first executive producer of 'Ideas' for CBC, still one of CBC's most outstanding radio programmes. Webb returned to British Columbia in the 1970's and has since been writing poetry, doing freelance radio work, and teaching at various universities. She has long been involved with Amnesty International. Phyllis Webb has published ten books of very fine poetry and two books of insightful essays. The Vision Tree: Selected Poems won the Governor General's Award in 1982. In 1992 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Webb is considered the poet's poet. Pauline Butling describes Webb's work as "playful, reflective, sensual, sonorous, formally inventive, and intellectually complex." Butling goes on to say that Webb's poetry "addresses compelling ethical and political questions such as social injustice, the use and abuse of power, and the relation between the personal and the political." Gary Geddes states, "Webb's technical preoccupations, along with her general lack of interest in narrative and parochial subjects, have cost her a certain popular attention, but they have made her a great favourite among poets" (20th C P&P 340).
Webb's life has spanned the evolution of poetry in Canada from the 1950's to the 21st century. Like Bob Dylan, she seems able continually to reinvent herself. Her poetry never stands still; it continually evolves. Like Dylan, she is an experimenter who takes often-daring risks. Her poetry reflects the energy of many of the movements that span the second half of the century, particularly post modernism. In the late 60's Webb published a provocative cycle of poems called Naked Poems - tight, condensed poems that pushed the boundaries of form and content. In an essay in Talking, Webb describes Naked Poems as an experiment away from narrative rhythm and structure and away from metaphor. These poems are, she says, very bare, very simple; their impact is in the effect of a slow building of image throughout. The poem captures a love affair in a very bare, very simple room:
TONIGHT quietness. In me and the room. I am enclosed by a thought and some walls.
THE BRUISE Again you have left your mark. Or we have. Skin shuttered Secretly However, the naked poems shift subtly from these stark, concrete images to abstract ideas: While you were away I held you like this in my mind. It is a good mind that can embody perfection with exactitude And finally, to philosophical questions: But when has my love ever been offered exactly and why should she be an exception? ... My white skin is not the moonlight. If it is, tell me, who reads by that light?
Naked Poems was also provocative at the time (1965), as its subject was the love affair of two women. Webb had begun her long journey into de-gendering the I/You of the poetic voice. We hear this vision again, much later in Hanging Fire (1990) when Webb asks: "Who is this I that is infesting my poems?" She is here formally raising questions of power and power relations, asking: who gets to speak?
Webb's work often address both the form and subject of power, of its uses and abuses; she eventually left her CBC job because "If I had stayed I would have become reasonably powerful and fairly well off for a single person, and I felt that my sympathies were on the side of the powerless"; if she became too powerful, she would be going against her basic sympathies (Seeing in the Dark 152). These sympathies took her not only to places like the Soviet Union, but also to intellectual planes, where her political activism questioned sexist hirings in the CBC, environmental issues such as nuclear testing, and human rights.
Many of these issues come together in her poem "Prison Report", a poem that takes a long, hard look at the state of our human condition in the 20th century. Jacobo Timmerman was a reporter, jailed for speaking the truth:
The eye of Jacobo Timmerman looks through the hole and sees Another eye looking through a hole. These holes are cut into steel doors in prison cells in Argentina. Both eyes are wary. They disappear. Timmerman rests his cheek on the icy door, amazed at the sense of space he feels-the joy. He looks again; the other's eye is there, Then vanishes like a spider. Comes back, goes, comes back. This is a game of hide-and seek. This is intelligence with a sense of humour. Timmerman joins the game. Sometimes two eyes meet at exactly the same moment. This is music. This is love playing in the middle of a dark night in a prison in Argentina. My name is Jacobo one eye says. Other eye says something, but Jacobo can't quite catch it. Now a nose appears in the vision-field of Timmerman. It rubs cold edges of the hole, a love rub for Jacobo. This is a kiss he decides, a caress, an emanation of love's tenderness. In this prison everything is powered electrically for efficiency and pain. But tenderness is also a light and a shock. An eye, a nose, a cheek resting against a steel door in the middle of the dark night. These are parts of bodies, parts of speech saying, I am with you.
Phyllis Webb continues to write poetry that challenges her reader's ideological and poetic boundaries. Any comfort that is to be found in her poetry is hard won; one must earn it. But her vision is compassionate and intelligent. Like "I Daniel," the poet messenger, Webb travels deep into the dark for all of us, bringing back coded but necessary messages.
Selected Titles: The Vision Tree Selected Poems (1982) GG; Wilson's Bowl (1980); Hanging Fire (1990)
Leonard Cohen (1934-)
Leonard Cohen is a poet and novelist, but he is best known as songwriter, recording star and performing pop cult figure, touring to sold-out crowds in North America and Europe. For most of his adult life, Cohen has been a still man in perpetual motion. His 1980 European tour consisted of 60 concerts in three months, followed by 40 concerts in two months, followed by 15 concerts in three weeks in Australia. Well into the 80's, Cohen claimed, "I've never lost my sense of privilege onstage. For three or four hours, you're playing with other musicians and the emotions of the audience, so that things happen that lift you into the realm of intensity that are beyond your own capacity."
Cohen was born in Montreal, in a wealthy Jewish family living in Westmount. His was a fairly typical Canadian childhood of winter skiing and hockey and summer swimming; he was a cub, a Boy Scout, a Sea Scout, a cub master, Student Council President in high school. This was a seemingly typical childhood, except for the fact that his father, who was always sickly with a heart condition, died when Cohen was nine, leaving his mother, a nurse of Russian heritage, to raise Leonard and his sister Esther. Cohen describes his mother as handsome, powerful and unpredictable. It wasn't until she was dying of leukaemia in 1978 that he began to fully understand her love.
World War II came as Cohen's first shock, "I remember the day my father brought home The Saturday Montreal Standard with the brown photographs of the death camps, the heaps of bodies, the crematoria. Something unbelievable had happened, some change in the cosmos, and it was aimed right at me."
Cohen studied at McGill and Columbia. Despite the fact that Cohen says he is not a poet because "a poet is something dead," his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), published by the McGill Poetry Series, under the guidance of Louis Dudek, sold out in the first month. His subsequent poetry and song writing go hand in hand. The Spice Box of the Earth was a book of poems and songs collected while Cohen was performing in nightclubs in Montreal and on CBC.
Cohen has lived in England, Norway, Cuba, and Greece, but admits, "I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations". He is our own Bob Dylan, a powerful voice of the sixties, our secular priest who served more than one generation. Gary Geddes states that, "Cohen inherited the mantle of the Beat poets, together with their spiritual questing, anti-establishment sentiments, and attraction to the subject of decadence, to which he added his own fascination with power and violence" (406).
Cohen admits that his inspiration comes from women, song and the draw of eternity.
Early on, after his year at Columbia University, he was given a grant to travel to Europe. He ended up on the Greek island of Hydra, living with Marianne Jensen and her son Axel. He stayed on and off for seven years writing two more books of poetry and two novels. (Each novel has sold more than a million copies worldwide). Marianne's support, nurturing and sympathy were appreciated while he was writing; in fact, Cohen states that it was necessary for the writing of novels. But at the completion of the novels, Cohen moved on, deciding he wanted to be a songwriter. In Nashville, he hooked up with Judy Collins and Columbia Records. Another relationship with Suzanne (from 'Suzanne takes you down' fame) was even more disastrous in reality, though of equal value in providing his muse. Marianne and Suzanne were not the only women who served as Cohen's muse:
For Anne With Annie gone, Whose eyes to compare With the morning sun? Not that I did compare But I do compare Now that she's gone.
Cohen's call from eternity relates to his spiritual identification with Israel. Like Klein and Layton, Cohen draws on his Jewish Canadian roots and experience. He has said: "In Hebrew the word Israel means struggle with God. The Jews are a vessel of something, and sometimes it's good vessel and sometimes a bad one, and their history is a movement in and out of obedience to the deepest laws of human behaviour-a renewal, over and over, of the conversation with eternity." Cohen's journey has always been a mystical quest, what he calls the quest "from ignorance to deeper ignorance". The spiritual quest is kept alive, his friend Irving Layton has claimed, by the dialectical tension between faith and scepticism. Cohen uses the metaphors of his religion, like Dylan, in complex patterns to reveal his interior life, what he calls "the interior predicament". He knows this interior space isn't always rational; it fails the laws of logic and even rhetoric.
Elegy Do not look for him In brittle mountain streams: They are too cold for any god; And do not examine the angry rivers For shreds of his soft body Or turn the shore stones for his blood; But in the warm salt ocean He is descending through cliffs Of slow green water And the hovering coloured fish Kiss his snow-bruised body And build their secret nests In his fluttering winding-sheet.
Layton, perhaps, best captures Cohen: "He is one of the few writers who has voluntarily immersed himself in the destructive element, not once but many times, then walked back from the abyss with dignity to tell us what he saw, to put a frame around the wind. I see Leonard as the white mouse they put down into a submarine to see if the air is foul - he is the white mouse of civilization who tests its foulness" (Interview in Chatelaine, September, 1983).
The 1990's were a productive time for Cohen. In 1993, he published Stranger Music, a collection of poems, song lyrics and fragments from his journals. This was the same year in which he released The Future, a powerful album of songs. Critics, such as Stephen Scobie, argue that one of the differences between poetry and song writing is that the songwriter draws on the popular images of a culture; the poet creates her own. Cohen, like Dylan, transcends the two in a new category of startling recognition: his songs are poems and his poems songs. In 'The Bus' Cohen mixes his exuberant joie de vivre with both mystery and social protest:
I was the last passenger of the day
I was alone on the bus,
I was glad they were spending all that money
just getting me up Eighth Avenue.
Driver! I shouted, it's you and me tonight
let's run away from this big city
to a smaller city more suitable to the heart,
let's drive past the swimming pools of Miami Beach
you in the driver's seat, me several rows back,
but in the racial cities we'll change places
so as to show how well you've done up North
and let us find ourselves some tiny American fishing village
in unknown Florida
and park right at the edge of the sand,
a huge bus
metallic, painted, solitary,
with New York platesIn 1995, Cohen went on a Zen retreat atop Mount Baldy in Southern California. After five years, he was ordained a Zen monk and given the Dharma name "Jikan", the silent one. He continues to collaborate on projects as diverse as short movie, rock opera, and most recently with songwriter, vocalist and instrumentalist Sharon Robinson for his newest album, 10 New Songs.
Selected Titles: Selected Poems 1956-1968 won the Governor General's Award, which Cohen declined to accept.
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.