In his foreword to the collection, Cohen’s son Adam Cohen notes that his father, “before he was anything else, was a poet. He is doing what he can, he is doing what he must, he is doing what he cannot not do. And yet how bereft one feels in browsing through “The Flame.” Sincerity is not a quality I generally set a lot of store by - at least not aesthetically - but Cohen wears his well. And again.Ĭohen was 82 when he died, which is not, in the grand scheme of things, a tragedy. He could be repetitive, but that was only because the things he was interested in, the things he wanted to describe, were worth returning to again and again.

He could be a little cheesy, a little passé, but that only added to his considerable charm. His work was a mirror held up to the self, but one that reflected more than the self. In a New Yorker magazine profile, published not long before the artist’s death, on Novem(the day, it has been noted in meaningful tones, before the election of Donald Trump to the presidency), David Remnick documented the respect Cohen commanded among fellow musicians even Bob Dylan - cryptic, grudging Bob Dylan - spoke plainly about his admiration.Ĭohen was a rare thing: the musician’s musician whose work resonated with civilians, an artist who spoke simply, clearly, who said no more than what needed to be said, but who also said no less. “I am trying to finish / My shabby career / With a little truth / In the now and here,” he writes in “If I Took a Pill.” Of course Cohen’s career was far from shabby. Mortality and its attendant urgencies are especially present in “The Flame,” the collection of poems, notebook jottings, lyrics and dashed-off but meticulous drawings that is Cohen’s last, as he knew it would be. “My Career” also puts front-and-center - indeed, it’s all front-and-center, only front-and-center - the mortal necessities Cohen heeded throughout his long and prolific career, the sense that time is ever, always, running out, that what little remains must be given shape and significance.

But the modesty may be a put-on, for in another poem, called “Kanye West Is Not Picasso,” the speaker asserts, with a fair amount of facetiousness, to be sure, that, while Kanye is no Picasso, “I am Picasso.” (In later lines, the speaker also claims, “I am the Kanye West of Kanye West,” and “I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is / When he shoves your ass off the stage / I am the real Kanye West.”) The poem is called “My Career.” Like so much of Cohen’s work, the poem reifies a certain kind of humbleness - before the divine, the beautiful, the mystical. ‘So little to say / So urgent / to say it, is the whole of one poem by the late Leonard Cohen.

The flame cohen