I’m still on a bit of a Leonard Cohen kick, as well as a YouTube fling.

Stay with me here, though; this isn’t just about Cohen.

As Gerard Vanderleun has noted, Cohen has an even darker side than the one I pointed out—which was already dark enough, to be sure, but with its redemptive qualities.

Follow the above link to a video of Cohen performing his very disturbing song “The Future.” While pondering its bleak vision of violence and anarchy, consider the fact that it was written around 1992 (although probably started years before; Cohen is on record as saying in interviews that it usually takes him years, if not decades, to write each song).

Cohen doesn’t turn to political matters often, but when he does, he has been known to demonstrate a certain prescience. Could it be that poets can sometimes sense things before others can? At least, certain poets. Then again, it may just be blowin’ in the wind.

In this interview on the subject of the song “The Future” back in 1992, Cohen says:

That’s a terrible song…It’s a grim vision, I think I left my anti-depressant pills at home.

Indeed. Here are just a few of the lyrics:

There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You’ll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown…

Cohen has said (scroll down to the last article) that the impetus for this song was the fall of the Berlin Wall, “which all my friends rejoiced about. I was the only dour person at the party, saying, ‘This isn’t that good news. This is going to produce a great deal of suffering. You’re going to settle for the Berlin wall when you see what’s coming next.'”

Well, it might be some type of foresight into the twenty-first century. Then again, it just might be Cohen seeing the always-half-empty glass; he is a pretty gloomy guy. But there’s an even more strangely disturbing foreshadowing song Cohen wrote, entitled “First We Take Manhattan.”

Here are some lyrics from that little ditty, published in 1988 on the album “I’m Your Man” [emphasis mine]:

I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…

(If you want to watch Cohen performing it, go here.)

Another fact about Cohen I learned from that interview is that—at least in 1992—he thought Hillary Clinton to be “immensely attractive.” Make of that what you will; after all, Cohen is a self-described “Ladies’ Man” (and please note the plural possessive).

But why am I going into all of this? Aside from the fact that Cohen’s songs, listened to with regularity, create some rather spectacularly tenacious earworms in the listener (although, to be sure, they are mercifully tuneful ones, unlike the notorious “It’s a Small World After All”)?

A while back I wrote about how poetry insinuates itself into our brains—or at least it used to, back when it rhymed. And about how modern poetry, with its general lack of rhyme or meter, has no such qualities. It’s difficult to memorize and eminently forgettable, even if enjoyed at first reading; it doesn’t create the poetic equivalent of earworms.

Relatively few poets today write what’s called formal poetry; that is, with rhyme and meter, or even simply with meter. True, there has been a small revival of forms, called—appropriately enough–the “new formalism,” somewhat analogous to a recent revival of representative art. Neo-neocon that I am, I’ve always been attracted to forms in poetry—and, in recent years, even before my political conversion, have written in forms. In some ways, my attraction to forms in writing (sonnets, for example, or villanelles, or terza rima), and in dancing (ballet), may have foreshadowed my later political changes—a closet conservative all the time, no doubt, despite my artsy-fartsy ways.

All of this is a lengthy means of coming around to saying that Cohen, as a poet, may have been drawn to songwriting partly because it afforded him the opportunity to use those archaic things known as rhyme and meter without running the risk of being called old-fashioned. No doubt there were plenty of other reasons—from his interviews, I’d say the man is pretty driven—but my guess is that this was one of them.

In my thread about rhyme and remembering poetry, many of the commenters wrote that in some ways songwriting has filled in the slack taken by the departure of forms in poetry. It’s true that there’s always been quite a bit of overlap, at least historically; “minstrels.” for example.

Homer, one of the earliest poets of whom we’re aware, is known to have used a lyre when he recited. But, apparently, he didn’t actually sing of Troy; he accompanied himself on the lyre in a sort of hybrid:

Homer not only recited his poems but used a κίθαρις, a sort of stringed instrument similar to a lyre. Homer did not sing his poems however, but he used the κίθαρις to mark rhythm, to play a musical interlude while he was thinking of something (let us not forget there was a certain amount of improvisation involved) and to indicate tone, pitch, and even mood (playing in a major chord to begin a thought, heightening it to a minor as the action or suspense rises, and resolving into major after some climax.) This musical accompaniment was indispensable to Homer and his contemporaries.

And then there was David, author of the psalms, and inspiration for many of the lyrics in Cohen’s much-beloved work, “Hallelujah” (“I’ve heard there was a secret chord/That David played, and it pleased the Lord”). The very word “psalm” means “songs sung to a harp.” Their longevity and memorizability, even in translation, are legendary. My understanding is that although they do not rhyme in the original, but rely on a sort of echoing quality of repetition of similar thoughts expressed in different words, their musicality is profound.

Poetry occupies some hybrid ground between words and music, but is neither. As I quoted Frost not long ago:

I have a tune [when writing poetry], but it’s a tune of the blend of [meter and rhythm]. Something rises–it’s neither one of those things. It’s neither the meter nor the rhythm,; it’s a tune arising from the stress on those–same as your fingers on the strings, you know. The twang!

Both poetry and song speak to arenas of the soul that prose can rarely reach. Poetry and song are linked to each other, and both are linked to the deepest wellsprings of human feeling. Both can descend into doggerel, but both can reach that height known as art—and, when they do, they can last for millenia.