Almost two years after the musician and poet’s death, Adam Cohen explains how his father’s efforts to finish his last collection The Flame ‘bought him some time on Earth’
- Exclusive: read three poems from The Flame below
Was he, in the end, a musician or a poet? A grave philosopher or a grim sort of comedian? A cosmopolitan lady’s man or a profound, ascetic seeker? Jew or Buddhist? Hedonist or hermit? Across his 82 years, the Montreal-born Leonard Cohen was all of these things – and in his posthumous book of poetry, given the Lawrentian title The Flame by his son Adam, all sides of the man are present.
Other than that, Adam Cohen won’t say much more. “This was all private,” he says, sitting in an office on Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard, near the house where his dad passed away after a late-night fall almost two years ago. “My father was very interested in preserving the magic of his process. And moreover, not demystifying it. Speaking of any of this,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper, “is a transgression.” But after a few more remarks – stressing that Cohen wrote entirely in solitude, that he would consider discussion of his work a dangerous sort of “vanity” – Adam describes his late father, his sense of himself, and the heart of his achievement reasonably well.
Continue reading...from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IlylVW
Comments
Post a Comment