MONTREAL — Leonard Cohen’s 75th birthday was celebrated not only by admirers in his native Montreal with an evening of poetry reading but also by a fan in outer space last week. (with video)
Montrealer Ann Weinstein is one of 75 poets worldwide who contributed to Leonard Cohen: You’re Our Man, a collection published on the occasion of his 75th birthday to raise funds to create a poet-in-residence program in his name at his alma mater, Westmount High School.
MONTREAL —
Leonard Cohen’s 75th birthday was celebrated not only by admirers in
his native Montreal with an evening of poetry reading but also by a fan
in outer space last week.
Montrealer Ann Weinstein is one of 75 poets worldwide who
contributed to Leonard Cohen: You’re Our Man, a collection published on
the occasion of his 75th birthday to raise funds to create a
poet-in-residence program in his name at his alma mater, Westmount High
School.
Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, who is orbiting Earth in the International Space Station, sent a videotaped message on the occasion of the famous poet-singer’s birthday on Sept. 21 that was played at the party.
“You know, Leonard Cohen’s poetry and music shares an awful lot in common with space flight: it seems to transcend the routine, they both defy familiar laws, and both take us to places we have never been before.”
Thirsk, who was passing over the Great Lakes heading to the Atlantic provinces at the time, said he is among the millions of Canadians who “love and adore” Cohen.
His work plumbs both the “emotional depth of love and the hard side of human tragedy.”
Thirsk, 56, a native of New Westminster, B.C., said Cohen’s creations “speak to me in ways that conventional poetry and prose do not,” because of the vivid images his words stir.
“Leonard, I wish you long life and prosperity. Happy birthday, you’re a great Canadian,” Thirsk signed off.
About 100 people came together at the Atwater Library auditorium to salute Cohen, who was on a concert tour in Europe that day and about to head for a show in Tel Aviv’s Ramat Gan Stadium, his first performance in Israel since 1975.
Appropriately, people who attended the Montreal celebration paid $75 a ticket for the modest get-together and, in most cases, another $25, for Leonard Cohen: You’re My Man, a collection of 75 poems, the majority by Canadians and the others by contributors in about 10 other countries, published for the occasion. They include both established writers and those who dabble in obscurity.
The event was organized by the non-profit Foundation for Public Poetry, which, with the blessings of Cohen, is trying to raise funds for the establishment of the Leonard Cohen Poet-in-Residence at Westmount High School (WHS), which Cohen attended.
Honouring Cohen in this way is the idea of the foundation’s founder and president Jack Locke, a poet himself and a baker by trade.
He was able to get the otherworldly birthday greetings with the assistance of Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut and now the Liberal MP for Westmount-Ville Marie riding.
Having a real-life poet on staff, at least for part of the year, would be a boost to the school’s language-arts curriculum and get teens interested in the written word, the foundation believes.
Poetry might also be common ground for its diverse enrolment of over 800. Today, WHS, which is under the English Montreal School Board, has students from not only Westmount, but also St. Henri, downtown, NDG and even as far away as Côte des Neiges and Côte St. Luc.
The birthday party also included a silent auction. Cohen contributed a limited-edition print of a self-portrait titled Back in Montreal, which he did in 1993. He depicts himself as a forlorn-looking bearded man.
Pre-eminent Canadian literary figure Margaret Atwood is the most famous contributor to the poetry collection. She also chipped in a signed “with much affection” and framed version of her six-stanza Setting Leonard to Music for the auction.
“You were the soulful bardic star of college girls,” like herself in the 1950s, she writes, then wistfully speaks of the passage of time and the inevitability of aging and its accompanying losses.
The poem ends with hope. “You’ve always known that life’s a song/ And you have to wing it/ Whatever darkness comes your way/ At least you’ll sing it.”
The 75 poems published in the collection were selected by Locke, who launched an open online competition for submissions. He asked for works inspired by or in response to Cohen’s poems and songs, preferably original.
Twenty-three of the poets were on hand to read their works, including David Seaman, a professor at Georgia Southern University, who flew in with his wife, Barbara.
“He and I got drunk together on many a night,” Seaman says of the man he never actually met.
Seaman performed his poem Waiting for Barbara, inspired by Cohen’s Waiting for Marianne.
The poets represented a wide range of ages and cultural backgrounds. One, Nelly Roffé, read her work in French.
Rona Feldman Shefler was a classmate and friend of Cohen’s at WHS.
She remembers an “introspective, quiet boy with a half-smile. He was gentle, not flamboyant, he never showed himself off.”
They hit it off, enjoying each other’s company. Her poem recalls the time they went astray from a school trip to the Elmhurst Dairy for ice cream, simply to take time out to talk, worrying their teachers about where they had gotten to.
Ann Weinstein, whose submission is titled Rites is inspired by Cohen’s poem of the same name. While Cohen wrote of his father’s dying and the trite consolations of visitors, Weinstein, who is in her 80s, evokes her husband’s final illness and death this summer.
Weinstein, who taught English at Dawson College, said she found Cohen’s words “spoke directly to me,” capturing her own feelings about watching a loved one suffer and dealing with well-intentioned, but meaningless, sympathy.
WHS student Elisha Hill, who had the honour of reading Atwood’s entry, said, “Poetry is not something my generation knows much about.” She is just being introduced to Cohen.
Lydia Lockett recited her poem with a torchy musical backup she composed. Cohen has had “a big influence on my life,” ever since she was a teen and she first spied him sitting alone in a Crescent Street café, looking “beautiful.”
“He was always most kind and inspiring,” she said.
Egyptian-born Ehab Lotayef said Cohen is the English-language poet who has most affected him, especially because of his biblical references. Lotayef then injected politics into the otherwise lighthearted evening, urging Cohen not to perform in Israel, which, Lotayef believes, “whitewashes Israel’s war crimes.”
All the profits from the book sales will go to the poet-in-residence project, because the nearly 900 copies were printed free of charge by Mascouche-based printer Friesens.
The evening concluded with a birthday cake decorated with one of Cohen’s insignias: two hearts overlapping to form a six-pointed star.
Two of Cohen’s relatives were present: Dusty Vineberg Solomon, 82, a former Montreal Star reporter, and her younger sister, Trina Vineberg Berenson. Their grandfather and Cohen’s grandmother were siblings.
The Vinebergs and Cohens lived two doors apart on Belmont Avenue in Westmount.
The young Cohen was “very popular” without being extroverted. “Charismatic is too strong a word, but everybody was just attracted to him,” Solomon said.
They have not kept in touch with Cohen in recent years, but have contact with his older sister, Esther, who lives in New York.
Whatever contact Solomon and Berenson have had with Cohen has left an impression. “He always has something wonderful to say… something memorable or profound or prophetic,” Solomon said, and he’s remained humble and generous, “a lovely human being.”
At the height of his celebrity, he once said to the sisters, “My life is not very different from yours. It has the same joys and the same disappointments.”
Two summers ago, Cohen, who has made his principal residence in California, spent an hour with Berenson. “He talked non-stop about the family. He seemed very happy to see and hear about them.”