Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on the Source of Poetry)

“Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers.” —Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), “Acceptance Address for the Prince of Asturias Awards,” Oct. 21, 2011, in The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings (2018) 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on the Soul and Longing)

“I’ve heard the soul unfolds
In the chambers of its longing
And the bitter liquor sweetens
In the hammered cup
But all the Ladders
Of the Night have fallen
Only darkness now
To lift the Longing up.” —Canadian poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), “Born in Chains,” in The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings (2018)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on the Need to ‘Listen to the Mind of God’)

“Listen to the sovereign heart
Resign its sovereignty
Listen to the sovereign heart
Don’t listen to me.
 
“Listen to the mind of God
Which doesn’t need to be
Listen to the mind of God
Don’t listen to me.” —Canadian poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), “Listen to the Hummingbird,” in The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings (2018)

 
Leonard Cohen died five years ago today in Los Angeles, but not before leaving a body of work focused on the manifest miseries facing every human being—and the wan but real ray of hope that manages to get through. “There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in,” he observed in one of the songs in the second half of his career, “Anthem.”
 
For an interesting analysis of an abiding characteristic of his work, see Allan Showalter’s August 2019 blog post, “The Human Predicament in Leonard Cohen’s Music.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on ‘Healing of the Spirit’)

“And let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb.”—Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), “Come Healing,” in The Flame: Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Drawings (2018)

Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on His Desired Audience)

“I want an audience of inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians etc., all that holy following of my Art.”—Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), to his publisher in 1960, quoted in Ira Nadel, Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (2007)

Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on What It Took to Gain ‘An Education in the World’)

“I pray that loving memory

exists for them too

the precious ones I overthrew

for an education in the world.”—Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), about his life in Greece in the 1960s, in “Days of Kindness,” from Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993)

(Photo of Leonard Cohen taken during the Geneva concert of the 2008 tour, Oct. 27, 2008, by Rama.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on Being ‘A Bird on the Wire’)

“Like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free.”— Leonard Cohen, “Bird on a Wire,” from his Songs From a Room LP (1969)

Remembering Canadian poet-novelist-singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016).

For a short but quite interesting consideration of how his work evokes “the human and the transcendent and spiritual,” see this blog post from the magazine Commonweal by Lisa Fullam. To experience how another artist has interpreted his songs, listen to the wondrous Jennifer Warnes on “Famous Blue Raincoat” (heard on this YouTube clip).

(Photo of Leonard Cohen on Canada Day, 2007, taken by Cory Doctorow from London, UK.)