News at Eleven: What he [Leonard Cohen] had to say

was poetry. He had started out as a poet, and his first public performances consisted of reciting verse in smoky, small Montreal coffee houses. He might as well have been in one when he stared into the distance in the way that poets sometimes do when they're reading out loud and began his soliloquy.

"I wrote this in a peeling room in the Chelsea Hotel, before I was rich and famous and they gave me well-painted rooms," he said. "I was coming off of amphetamines, and I was pursuing a blonde lady whom I met in a Nazi poster. And I was doing many things to attract her attention. I was lighting wax candles in the form of men and women. I was marrying the smoke of two cones of sandalwood." Then, he started playing another of his songs, "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong."

from Tablet: St. Leonard's Passion
then Winnipeg Free Press: Portrait of the artist: As an older man

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