LEONARD COHEN FOR GOVERNOR-GENERAL
Leonard Cohen is my favorite Canadian poet. Not that that’s really saying a whole lot — I’d be hard-pressed to name five Canadian poets.
Beautiful Losers is brilliant, and I have a Sunday morning ritual of putting on the first CD of Essential Leonard Cohen, when he was more about the folk guitar and less about the smooth jazz stylings of the second collection. A girl I worked with at the bookstore was completely obsessed with him; she even wrote a one-woman play about it called Not a Shiksa, which she performed at last year’s Fringe Festival. Very awesome.
Leonard Cohen performed in concert on CBC Television. I only caught a part of it, but it struck me as unusual that, instead of singing in that inimitable golden rumble, he was fucking his backup singers, live, on television. The three singers were each crouched on all fours, lined up in a row facing the audience with that familiar bored/stupid look of porn actresses on their extremely made-up faces. Cohen would mount each in turn and recite a short free-verse poem, on the subject of love. The stage design was quite minimal with black curtains, tastefully lit. Massey Hall, perhaps? The television cameras cut to different perspectives, but the audience was never shown.
I remember thinking: That’s weird, how can CBC possibly get away with showing this?
I really wish I could remember the poems.