Thanks so much for this fascinating piece--prose,
prose poem, and poem all in one. Your responses always
tend to be generous and to the point. More on Cohen by
you (bayou?) would suit me fine. What's the one that's
far too long got to say? Maybe you could send me a
photocopy instead of spending hours at the
keyboard(?).
Thanks again,
Candice
--- Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I like it, Candice. Funny how Cohen's often
> traditional (looking)
> lyrics provoke something else in others.
>
> I have done two, one far too long, but I'll show the
> other here (from
> Breath Takes).
>
> Doug
> On 5-Jul-07, at 5:22 AM, MC Ward wrote:
>
> > Mise-en-tranche: A tribute song
> >
> > _I haven't been this happy
> > Since the end of World War II_
> > (Leonard Cohen, "Waiting for the Miracle")
>
>
> W[H]earing it.
> Fragmented memories.
>
>
> I know the song well & for me it always
> had that end of December feeling,
> a way of writing you now, singing the
> good times as well as the bad. I also wore a
> raincoat in New York’s cold or anywhere I’m living.
> Then there’s music meant to last all thru the
> evening,
> a slow orgasm of tears deep in the desert of song.
> I never could
> afford a
> Burberry but he could, or did, the proceeds of some
> kind of record
> I bought (& later the CD I’m listening to this
> moment), & you did too.
> I
> got it – the joke, the book, the song’s contrapuntal
> ironies
> in those doubled words he didn’t need to go to
> London to learn. Now you, I, even he
> in all his fame & glory, look so much older than in
> Because we are.
>
>
> It seems to be a way of slipping the self, that ego
> hung out through the open window (flung out),
> ironically the
> more he escaped the more he was trapped
> heroically going to the station to meet every train
> when not one would take him far enough away from
> I. Who changed his face so often,
> took pains to hide, yet always came back
> out from the monastery, the recording studio,
> the little house on Hydra. In Paris,
> lining the streets outside L’Olympia
> and cheering for the 23rd encore, the beast
> achieved critical mass and gave him the
> glory he insisted he refused to seek.
> When later that voice goes lower
> the lines refuse the easy rhyme just for the
> frayed moment: raincoat, Jane, you, & the
> sleeves torn at the shoulder
> were part of the guesswork, loss, forgiveness, all
> repaired like the coat. The enemy sleeping now
> with your woman (Jane?) may be
> a taste of the trouble you took from her eyes, some
> little lock of hair for remembrance, the black
> leather coat that replaced that famous blue one
> finally.
>
>
> Things tend downwards, hard days turn worse. Those
> were the days, the nights, the voice more or less
> clear. Enough for poetry and song.
>
>
> I mostly listen to others now, those tough women,
> but
> knew those lyrics well &
> how the lyric lies in wait
> to catch the imagination still,
> dress it up
> in identification, or at least overhearing
> those sly come-ons we still believed in the
> days before we took Berlin.
>
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>
>
> You may allow me moments
> not monuments, I being
> content. It is little,
> but it is little enough.
>
> John Newlove
>
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