Margin Notes

What I was reading (backstory included):

(In the eighth grade, my English assigned our class a relatively straightforward project: choose a theme, find poems with the chosen theme, type the poems, print the poems, and illustrate the poems.

My father dropped me off at the public library to find poems with a theme while he ran the week’s errands. Hours later, he returned to find me cross-legged on the floor in front of the poetry section with a half dozen books open. I had leafed through collections of love poetry, lots of ridiculous children’s poetry, and impossibly long poetry. I was discouraged.

Dad, in his wisdom, spied a copy of Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen on the top shelf. He handed me the book and took me over to the CD library and pulled The Essential Leonard Cohen two-disc set out of the stacks. Wanting to get on with my project, I checked them out and thought to myself on the drive home, “I’ll just call my project ‘Leonard Cohen’s Love Songs’ and be done with it.”

“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet”

“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin”

“I’ve loved you for a long, long time; I know this love is real”

The first lines of what I thought would be silly little love songs written down were actually blowing my eighth-grade mind! My love affair with poetry began with this project and continues today.)

Recently, I’ve been listening to The Book of Longing, a collection of poems that Leonard recorded for Audible in his living room not long before he passed away, on the drives between Fredericton and Saint John. I’ve been trying to put myself in the headspace of when I was my students’ age, when – but more importantly, how – songs and poems started blowing my mind.

Leonard’s poems have a different character and shape than his songs. The poems contend with many of the same concerns as the songs – love, loss, loving again, getting old, dying, spiritual matters, etc. – but they are less grand, more banal, and in some ways funnier than the songs. During one of those drives, I was thinking about our class on how best to cultivate a sense of writing identity among our students. I was half-thinking how quietly reluctant I might have been to think of myself as a writer, let alone a poet, at that age, especially after my encounter with a real master like Leonard, when these lines of his came through the sound system:

“Thousands” (2001)

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.

Craft moves I noticed:

• Leonard concludes his poem with the line “and this is my story,” which we might normally find at the start of a poem.
• Leonard establishes a dichotomy between genuine poets and fake poets, suggesting that he will either tell us what makes a poet “the real thing” or what makes the distinction irrelevant.
• Leonard does neither, picking up his mantle as “one of the fakes,” confounding the reader’s expectations.

Invitations for writers (and fakes):

• End with a beginning: Consider ending your poem with a conventional opening line such as “…this is my story,” “…once upon a time,” “…a long time ago,” or introduce your subject at the end as though you haven’t already provided the details.
• Play with reader expectations: Consider taking your reader down a conventional train of thought and then take them off the rails later on.
• Shift the tone and call it quits: Consider moving your shift in tone from somewhere in the middle of your poem to the very end, letting your reader come to their own conclusions.