XPost: alt.arts.poetry.comments
Will Dockery wrote:
George J. Dance wrote:
Today's poem on Penny's Poetry blog:
'Tis May Now in New England, by Bliss Carman
Back to the golden marshes
Comes summer at full tide
[...]
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2022/05/tis-may-now-in-new-england-bliss-carman.html
Perhaps we'll known in Canada, Bliss Carman is definitely somewhat obscure here in the U.S.
The most famous Canadian poet here would have to be Leonard Cohen.
🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
**************** Poetry and novels
For six decades, Leonard Cohen revealed his soul to the world through poetry and song—his deep and timeless humanity touching our very core. Simply brilliant. His music and words will resonate forever.
—Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 2008[16]
In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he became president of the McGill Debating Union and won the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition for the poems "Sparrows" and "Thoughts of a Landsman".[17] Cohen published his first poems in March
1954 in the magazine CIV/n. The issue also included poems by Cohen's poet–professors (who were also on the editorial board) Irving Layton and Louis Dudek.[17] Cohen graduated from McGill the following year with a B.A. degree.[11] His literary
influences during this time included William Butler Yeats, Irving Layton (who taught political science at McGill and became both Cohen's mentor and his friend),[11] Walt Whitman, Federico GarcĂa Lorca, and Henry Miller.[18] His first published book of
poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), was published by Dudek as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series the year after Cohen's graduation. The book contained poems written largely when Cohen was between the ages of 15 and 20, and Cohen dedicated
the book to his late father.[11] The well-known Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye wrote a review of the book in which he gave Cohen "restrained praise".[11]
After completing his undergraduate degree, Cohen spent a term in the McGill Faculty of Law and then a year (1956–1957) at the Columbia University School of General Studies. Cohen described his graduate school experience as "passion without flesh, love
without climax".[19] Consequently, Cohen left New York and returned to Montreal in 1957, working various odd jobs and focusing on the writing of fiction and poetry, including the poems for his next book, The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), which was the first
book that Cohen published through the Canadian publishing company McClelland & Stewart. His father's will provided him with a modest trust income sufficient to allow him to pursue his literary ambitions for the time, and The Spice-Box of Earth was
successful in helping to 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. One of Cohen's biographers, Ira Nadel, stated that "reaction to the finished book was enthusiastic and admiring...."The critic Robert Weaver found it powerful and declared that Cohen was 'probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.'"
[11]
Cohen continued to write poetry and fiction throughout the 1960s and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances after he bought a house on Hydra, a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf. While living and writing on Hydra, Cohen published the poetry
collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). His novel The Favourite Game was an autobiographical bildungsroman about a young man who discovers his identity through writing. Beautiful Losers
received a good deal of attention from the Canadian press and stirred up controversy because of a number of sexually graphic passages.[11] Regarding Beautiful Losers, the Boston Globe stated: "James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the
name of Cohen." In 1966 Cohen also published Parasites of Heaven, a book of poems. Both Beautiful Losers and Parasites of Heaven received mixed reviews and sold few copies.[11]
In 1966, CBC-TV producer Andrew Simon produced a local Montreal current affairs program, Seven on Six, and offered Cohen a position as host. "I decided I'm going to be a songwriter. I want to write songs," Simon recalled Cohen telling him.[20]
And yet, despite his “disappointing” career, and before ever publishing a song, Cohen was the subject of a 44-minute-long short documentary from the National Film Board called Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen.
Subsequently, Cohen published less, with major gaps, concentrating more on recording songs. In 1978, he published his first book of poetry in many years, Death of a Lady's Man (not to be confused with the album he released the previous year, the
similarly titled Death of a Ladies' Man). It was not until 1984 that Cohen published his next book of poems, Book of Mercy, which won him the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry. The book contains 50 prose-poems, influenced by the
Hebrew Bible and Zen writings. Cohen himself referred to the pieces as "prayers".[21] In 1993 Cohen published Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, and in 2006, after 10 years of delays, additions, and rewritings, Book of Longing. The Book of Longing
is dedicated to the poet Irving Layton. Also, during the late 1990s and 2000s, many of Cohen's new poems and lyrics were first published on the fan website The Leonard Cohen Files, including the original version of the poem "A Thousand Kisses Deep" (
which Cohen later adapted for a song).[22][23]
Cohen's writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, was "like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's
very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."[24]
In 2011, Cohen was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for literature.[25]
His books have been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish.*************
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