In the last months of his life, despite severe physical limitations, Leonard Cohen made selections for what would be his final volume of poems. The Flame presents this work in a format that his editors, Professors Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano, and his longtime Canadian publisher believe reflects Leonard’s intentions, based on the manuscript that he compiled, and using stylistic choices he made for previous books as a guide. Robert Faggen began the project working closely with Leonard, and Alexandra Pleshoyano joined to assist with completion of the editing in April 2017. Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, suggested the title.
Leonard provided clear instructions for the organization of the book, which was to contain written work and a generous sampling of his drawings and self-portraits. He envisioned three sections. The first section contains sixty-three poems that he had carefully selected, chosen from a trove of unpublished work that spans decades. Leonard was known to work on his poems for many years—sometimes many decades—before they were published; he considered these sixty-three poems completed works.
The second section contains the poems that became lyrics from his last four albums. All the lyrics for Leonard’s songs begin as poems, and thus they can be appreciated as poems in their own right more than those of most songwriters. Notably, Leonard has published some of his lyrics as poems in the New Yorker prior to release of the album on which the song containing the lyrics appears. This was true most recently for “Steer Your Way,” and previously for “A Street,” “Almost Like the Blues,” and “Going Home.” In presenting the lyrics of Anjani Thomas’s album Blue Alert (2006), produced by Leonard, and Leonard’s Old Ideas (2012), Popular Problems (2014), and You Want It Darker (2016), we have followed the formatting which Leonard used in his book of selected poems and songs, Stranger Music (1993), which featured many lyrics. Careful readers will note differences between how these poems appear in The Flame and how the lyrics appear in the lyrics accompanying the albums.
The third section of the book presents a selection of entries from Leonard’s notebooks, which he kept on a daily basis from his teenage years up until the last day of his life. Robert Faggen supervised the transcription of more than three thousand pages of notebooks that span six decades. Though Leonard participated in the selection of notebook entries for The Flame, he did not specify a final order. It would be challenging—if not impossible—to proceed chronologically because Leonard would often work in the same notebooks over many years with various coloured inks showing the different entries. Leonard numbered the notebooks in a system that we do not understand. That said, we chose to follow the numerical order of the notebooks even if these are apparently not always chronological. These notebook selections include a variety of stanzas and lines—what Leonard once called “scraps”—and readers familiar with Leonard’s work will often see entries that appear to be working drafts of poems and lyrics. No attempt has been made to form a definitive narrative between these notebooks, and the entries have been reproduced here as closely as possible to the way they appear in the notebooks themselves, with no attempts made to change punctuation or line breaks. In transcribing the notebook entries, we followed certain conventions, and the following symbols are used in listing variants: {} indicates a word or phrase written above or below the line; [?] indicates an illegible word or phrase; and *** indicates a break between notebook entries.
In addition to these three sections of the book, Leonard wished to publish his acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award, given in Spain on October 21, 2011. Elsewhere we are including—courtesy of Leonard’s friend and colleague Peter Scott—one of Leonard’s last e-mail exchanges, written less than twenty-four hours before his passing.
Leonard had suggested that some of his self-portraits and drawings be included, a practice that he began in Book of Longing (2006). Since Leonard did not have the chance to make these selections, Alexandra Pleshoyano chose nearly seventy self-portraits from more than 370 that he created, along with twenty-four drawings from his artwork. Leonard also agreed that we could reproduce some of the notebook pages to illustrate the book; twenty such selections are included here.
Finally, a few notes on individual poems. The poem “Full Employment” is essentially a longer version of the poem “G-d Wants His Song.” The similarity between the poem “The Lucky Night” and the poem “Drank a Lot” is also worth noting. The poem “Undertow” was released as a song on Leonard’s album Dear Heather (2004). The poem “Never Gave Nobody Trouble” was also released as a song on Leonard’s live album Can’t Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour (2015). The poems “A Street” and “Thanks for the Dance” are presented in slightly different versions as lyrics in the second part of the book. Those familiar with the Leonard Cohen Files website, hosted by Jarkko Arjatsalo, will recognize a few poems, self-portraits, and drawings, which had been posted there with Leonard’s permission.
Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano
July 2018