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A review by micadat
The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings by Leonard Cohen
5.0
I am a fan of many of Leonard’s songs. I really enjoyed the poem where he speaks to his Roshi who had gone through a sex scandal. I really enjoyed one where he says “I need to be weightless, but I never am”. And the homage to Morente, a gypsy singer who sang Leonard’s Halleluya better than the original in a way that made him feel “humbled but not humiliated”.
Reading Leonard Cohen, I can say I felt “humbled but not humiliated”. This respect for the office of the poet, of the singer, of a profound and religious sort. This respect for the office he belonged to, his own humility in regards to his profession makes it easier to be humble myself.
That these poems, rhyming sometimes easily, in what often seem like simple schemes, could be the work of a lifetime, a master workmanship that deserves great admiration is I guess shocking. And perhaps most shocking of all that the master worksman should sometimes say “I am [just] a whore/ and a junkie” and that critics are right, his work is “cheap, superficial, pretentious, insignificant”. I choose to read this much as Bodhidharma's words in front of a Chinese monarch, when he says he doesn’t who he is, and that the greatest teaching of the dharma is “Vast emptiness and nothing holy”. That poetry or art could be in simple things, that artfulness is not in sheer complexity or in labour, but in a “beauty” in some sense magical or spiritual.
“Humbled but not humiliated” how much do just these words say?
Reading Leonard Cohen, I can say I felt “humbled but not humiliated”. This respect for the office of the poet, of the singer, of a profound and religious sort. This respect for the office he belonged to, his own humility in regards to his profession makes it easier to be humble myself.
That these poems, rhyming sometimes easily, in what often seem like simple schemes, could be the work of a lifetime, a master workmanship that deserves great admiration is I guess shocking. And perhaps most shocking of all that the master worksman should sometimes say “I am [just] a whore/ and a junkie” and that critics are right, his work is “cheap, superficial, pretentious, insignificant”. I choose to read this much as Bodhidharma's words in front of a Chinese monarch, when he says he doesn’t who he is, and that the greatest teaching of the dharma is “Vast emptiness and nothing holy”. That poetry or art could be in simple things, that artfulness is not in sheer complexity or in labour, but in a “beauty” in some sense magical or spiritual.
“Humbled but not humiliated” how much do just these words say?