https://jimadamsauthordotcom.wordpress.com/2020/09/19/o-canada/

Woohoo, this prompt gives me the opportunity to share Leonard Cohen. Thank you Jim.

Cohen shared a common passion with me, we love writing poetry. The Spice-Box of Earth helped expand the audience for Cohen’s poetry, helping him reach out to the poetry scene in Canada, outside the confines of McGill University. The book also helped Cohen gain critical recognition as an important new voice in Canadian poetry.

His styles vary so much in his poetry.

Waiting for Marianne from “Flowers for Hitler”

I have lost a telephone
with your smell in it
I am living beside the radio
all the stations at once
but I pick out a Polish lullaby
I pick it out of the static
it fades I wait I keep the beat
it comes back almost alseep

Did you take the telephone
knowing I’d sniff it immoderately
maybe heat up the plastic
to get all the crumbs of your breath

and if you won’t come back
how will you phone to say
you won’t come back
so that I could at least argue

Silence

and a deeper silence

when the crickets

hesitate

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”—Leonard Cohen.

“Judy Collins recalls that when she first met him, he said he couldn’t sing or play the guitar, nor did he think “Suzanne” was even a song:

And then he played me “Suzanne”  … I said, “Leonard, you must come with me to this big fundraiser I’m doing” … Jimi Hendrix was on it. He’d never sung [in front of a large audience] before then. He got out on stage and started singing. Everybody was going crazy—they loved it. And he stopped about halfway through and walked off the stage. Everybody went nuts. … They demanded that he come back. And I demanded; I said, “I’ll go out with you.” So we went out, and we sang it. And of course, that was the beginning of an incredible musical career.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen

I cried when I heard Leonard passed. I have every album he made and his poetry books.