GoodCleanWholesomeFun

“ Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing. Needless to say, I am one of the fakes, and this is my story. ” - Leonard Cohen reciting his own poem, “Thousands,” in Leonard Cohen Discusses Life , a PBS interview first broadcast 28 June 2006.

This site includes the Real Player audio of the interview by Jeffery Brown as well as the full transcript.

While Leonard Cohen, in this interview, discusses mostly the process and significance of writing poetry, he also deals with aging.

JEFFREY BROWN: This sense of aging is in this book.
LEONARD COHEN: Yes, definitely.
JEFFREY BROWN: Does that signify you are, in fact, feeling that?
LEONARD COHEN: Oh, of course, sure. Of course you feel it, you know. My friend, Irving Layton, our greatest Canadian poet, he said, ‘The inescapable lousiness of growing old.’
JEFFREY BROWN: ‘The inescapable lousiness of growing old?’
LEONARD COHEN: That’s right. That’s right.

My own perception is that Jeffrey Brown sounds, like most of us, as though he is in denial about Leonard Cohen’s age and mortality. That this situation mirrors the denial most of us maintain about our own mortality because of our discomfort with the notion is no less true for being a pop psychology cliche.

Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, seems determined to focus and refocus on the issue, mining his own aging as one more rich vein of human experience to be transformed into images and texture for his poetry, his songs - and his interviews.

The broadcast, which is well worth a listen, can be found at Leonard Cohen Discusses Life