A Song for Cohen + Not in the Plenty, the Joy

[Rosewind]

Perhaps this needs a little introduction. I stumbled over Leonard Cohen in the 1980s around the time when "Various Positions" was released and two programmes (documentaries) were aired on Danish television. A friend of mine loved "Take this Waltz" and played it to me and pointed out its references to Lorca. We listened to the whole album and the follow-up "I'm Your Man" a lot of course. As I was and is interested in poetry and dabbled / dabbles in both Danish and English (I've written 10 times more poems in English actually ... "English/the language/what it means to me/a key/ the Rossetta Stone/ of poetry), I naturally also tuned into Cohen's poetry and own two volumes "Flowers for Hitler" and "The Book of Longing". I of course own almost all his records (some both as LPs and CDs). Later I had the longing (yes that's the word) to see for myself what Hydra was all about. So I finally went there in 1994 with my American wife. To me it was some sort of pilgrimage. We let a room with a Greek-British couple there, and I walked around Hydra Town with my notebooks and wrote and wrote. A few things from that notebook emerged into poems that reveal an affiliation with Cohen or perhaps an attempt on my part to step out of his overwhelming shadow. In a way I seem to pretend that I am able to claim what he left behind in Hydra, on the other hand I also had the sense of letting myself be absorbed into the beauty of the place, a sense of letting go / of forgetting myself (and my life then).

For the last 15 years I have worked with a Danish poet who published dtwo books of poetry in the 1980s and the first one, a real tour-de-force, he claims to have written on equal amounts of Cohen's "Songs of Love and Hate" and single malt whisky. His book of poems is really one single poem shattered (like the broken relationship it describes) into many induvidual poems about that same woman he loved and hated.

The lines of the poems below are supposed to gently float from line to line but since I do not know how to format it to do just that, the poems look flat and strange. And ...they are supposed to be recited or the beauty of them will be lost.

A Song for Cohen

One day I'll write a song
for Cohen,
because his music
and poems
once meant the difference
to me.
I even went to Hydra
to breathe in his air there,
and although I really met
a man
who claimed Cohen
as his friend,
I found that Cohen was
long gone,
having parted
with his dream of Hydra
and the lovely island siren muse
who set him up
in that room
with Marianne
and the barbed wires
of poetry and song.
Still, I felt the presence then
of essential morning beauty
on my pilgrimage,
an ascent by flesh and will,
from Hydra Town
into the modest heights
of this island's dreamy Xerox
of Petrarch's Mont Ventoux
(near Laure in Fontaine de Vaucluse).
Now what Cohen left
I claim as mine,
jealously.


Not in the Plenty, the Joy
(after a Greek saying)

Simply sitting
and letting go,
the art of forgetting
is incredibly hard
to know.
I'm better, though,
than I was before
and one day even I,
may for sure,
be one with the poems
of Hydra,
just being,
relaxing,
seeing
the creation
of beautiful things.