Day: November 13, 2016

Gotta add one more … our good friend Jim sends along this link to an astonishing and moving account of one person’s experience of the impact of Leonard Cohen in his life:

http://www.avclub.com/article/dancing-end-leonard-cohen-245785

Thanks, Jim.

My Leonard Cohen obsession continues …

Soon after I moved to Los Angeles in the Sixties (before I had ever heard of Leonard Cohen, and well before his first album in 1967), I found an apartment just off Hollywood Boulevard. I often walked down that street to a small bookstore where I spent hours poring over mostly esoteric or foreign or little-known (to me) prose and poetry.  One day, I came upon a small book of poems by one Leonard Cohen, then unknown to me. Thumbing through the book I was struck by these brief lines:

Marita/Please find me/I am almost 30

(I took the book home with me.  However, I have searched for some years for that book, but … too many moves over the years, too many friends with good intentions who borrowed both albums and books … I suspect that the poem was included in Cohen’s 1968 “Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems, 1956-1968“, but it is hard to find and/or pretty expensive now.)

Much later I was to find that Cohen was said to have written these lines either on the wall of an alley beside, or in the mens’ room of, a Montreal bar (see photo at top). 

He went on to expand the poem, which you can hear now:

More on this here and here.

And I believe the origin of the poem is discussed in this National Film Board of Canada documentary, made in 1965 but discovered by myself only four or five years ago:

https://www.nfb.ca/film/ladies_and_gentlemen_mr_leonard_cohen/

I also see that copies of this film are showing up on YouTube:

Finally, in the course of my Internet travels, Father John Misty (of “I Love You, Honeybear” fame, one of my favorites from about 2013) has issued this homage: