“Like a bird on the wire,  Like a drunk in a midnight choir,  I have tried in my way to be free.”

We mourn the passing of a Leonard Norman Cohen: Canadian Singer, Songwriter, Poet and Novelist. Cohen died today on the 11th of November 2016, at the age of 82. For many years, Leonard Cohen has been revealing his soul to the world through his poetry and songwriting. His profound and timeless words expressed through his poetical music have already touched 4 generations and will continue to do so for many to come.

When Cohen began writing poetry and novels his intellect became more abundantly present. Although for sure he will be remembered more for his songs he has written many beautiful books and poetry.
His bestseller “Book of Longing” contains a great collection of his poetry and drawings. It was published in 2006. Soon after the release Philip Glass composed modern classical music to the beautiful poetic lyrics. Glass and Cohen have been performing together and also recorded a CD that might still be available.

Other novels include “The Favorite Game” and “Beautiful Losers”. Some of his most elegant published poetry is “Let Us Compare Mythologies” and “The Spice-Box of Earth”. I personally think the mystery he added to the words in his songs is what makes his music attractive to people. You never get bored listening to it.

“Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the ‘illogical’ line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture,” author Tom Robbins wrote in the booklet of “Tower of Song,” a 1996 tribute album.

As a singer-songwriter, he had a literary sensibility that made him a popular artist. The older he got the happier he become which led him to say: “ … That background of distress dissolved. I’m worried now that my songs are too cheerful because I’m feeling well. I think I may be irrelevant pretty soon.” In the end, he didn’t… He will stay with us for a long time….

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”The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.”

Anna Akhmatova ((23 June 1889 – 5 March 1966 / Odessa)

www.moniquespassions.com

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“Hands, do what you’re bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.”

William Butler Yeats

Photo: The Balloon Merchant, 1931
Jules Brassai

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“A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.”
― Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine II
Anders Zorn – 1895

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Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928

British novelist and poet, note written in 1899

Painting

Thomas Hardy by William Strang, 1893

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“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“An artist is a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness…an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting. The poet is like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man’s personality. For him alone everything is vacant…The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts to his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.”

Charles Baudelaire

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At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors;
the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the
garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.”
― Octavio Paz

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Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.  

Hannah Arendt

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In the last pages of her diary, she wrote: “To die, after feeling everything and being nothing…”.

Source count of the Moon

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