Leonard Cohen's Prince of Asturias Speech

Issue 27

January 2021

Even before he had much of an audience, Leonard Cohen had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted - he was out to reach inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists. Through his poems, novels and songs, he has managed to do so. His work has a death-haunted, spiritual texture. When asked if he intended his work to reflect a kind of spirituality, he hesitated before he answered. “I start with artistic dedication. I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on to the other human receptors. But I dare not begin from the other side. It’s like pronouncing the holy name - you simply don’t do it. But if you are lucky, and you are graced, then these deeper responses will be produced.”

Playlist inspired by the stimulus

How to Account for the Origin & Four Minutes, Thirty Three Seconds

Ayokunle Falomo

Of each thought when—like an animal— / It leaps, the mind, from branch to branch. /

Makers

Scheherazade Loft

Cups and plates and mugs and bowls line the cupboards of most of the houses in the little town of Braunton.

Let Me Show You Some Chords

Miryam Sas

Poem and translation based on work by Sagawa Chika.

Poetry Comes From a Place That You Command

Konstantinos Doxiadis

An essay rejecting Cohen's claim that poetry is not controlled or commanded by its creator.

Lament

Devon Brock

O! Barren land, hold me in winter, / stripped of all passions. / Let me,swollen with the vaults of summer/

The Seagull Song

Vladi Voinich

the voices of seagulls deceive mariners / they don’t signal how close soil is / but only warn the unlucky travellers

Bruno's Line

Nacho Oliden

Reading the pages in which Borges goes over the traditions of time...

The Garden of Love

The Dreamers

An indie rock piece from the Greek band 'The Dreamers,' based on the poem 'The Garden of Love' by William Blake.

Selected notes from the past few years featuring Cohen

Eszter Bencsik

I woke up late. Looked out the small window overhead.

Of Moss and Memory

Allison A. deFreese

All night / a ghost with six fingers / has been sweeping / these same polydactyl chords

Elan Vital

Vasiliki Poula

I come from the race of potters. / I, their breath, an artisan of the earth. / I gather the smithereens from the soil

Navigator

Harriet Truscott

the oars / your arms / spine / the keel / your rudder / words

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