Read Online I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons - Free Book Online Page A

Marc Chagall and A. M. Klein are the subjects of other poems; Leonard’s father and uncles appear in “Priests 1957.” The masterful prose poem that ends the book, “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” is one of three about Leonard’s late grandfather. Rabbi Kline was a scholar and mystic, a holy man, a man of conviction; Leonard considered him the ideal Jew, someone who did not struggle with ambiguities as Leonard did. From Leonard’s description of himself in “The Genius” (“For you / I will be a banker Jew . . . / For you / I will be a Broadway Jew,” etc.) he was less sure what kind of Jew he was himself. And yet, in “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” there are passages that might apply to Leonard as much as to his grandfather: “It is strange that even now prayer is my natural language. . . . The black, the loss of sun: it will always frighten me. It will always lead me to experiment. . . . O break down these walls with music. . . . Desolation means no angels to wrestle. . . . Let me never speak casually.”
    As in Let Us Compare Mythologies, there are poems that are called “songs.” When Leonard became a songwriter, some of their content would be taken up in actual songs. Fans of his music will recognize King David and the bathing woman seen from the roof in “Before the Story” in the song “Hallelujah,” the “turning into gold” in “Cuckold’s Song” in the song “A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes,” and the poem “As the Mist Leaves No Scar” as the song “True Love Leaves No Traces.”
    Critical reaction to The Spice-Box of Earth was for the most part very positive. Louis Dudek, who two years earlier had taken Leonard to task in print, applauded the volume unconditionally. Robert Weaver wrote in the Toronto Daily Star that Leonard was “probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.” 10 Arnold Edinborough, reviewing for the Canadian Churchman, concurred, stating that Leonard had taken Irving Layton’s crown as Canada’s leading poet. Stephen Scobie would later describe the book in The Canadian Encyclopedia as the one that established Leonard’s reputation as a lyric poet. There were a few barbs; David Bromige, in Canadian Literature, had problems with “the ornateness of the language” and felt that Leonard should “write less about love, and think about it longer,” but concluded that “the afflictions mentioned here are curable, and once Cohen has freed his sensibility from ‘the thick glove of words’ he will be able to sing as few of his contemporaries can.” 11 The first edition of the book sold out in three months.
    Looking back, it is curious to see how this mature, important book sat between two incongruously immature incidents. Just prior to publication there had been his adventure in Havana. Postpublication there was a stranger and even riskier episode, involving a junkie Beat novelist, a rescue mission and an opium overdose. Alexander Trocchi was a tall, charismatic Scotsman of Italian descent, nine years Leonard’s senior. In the fifties he had moved into a cheap hotel in Paris, where he founded the literary magazine Merlin, published Sartre and Neruda, wrote pornographic novels and espoused his own Beat-meets-early-hippie interpretation of Situationism. An enthusiast for drugs, he turned his heroin addiction into Dadaist performance art; Trocchi, as Leonard would describe him in verse, was a “public junkie.”
    Trocchi moved to New York in 1956, the same year that Leonard went there to attend Columbia University, and took a job working on a tugboat on the Hudson River. He spent his nights, as Leonard did, in Greenwich Village, before taking over a corner of Alphabet City and founding the “Amphetamine University.” “Trocchi and a bunch of his