the green notebook,

, further notes from 2024: Covid notes, Leonard Cohen and John Lent, Vanessa Lent and Sainte-Adèle, Quebec,

There’s a new biography of Leonard Cohen I’d been curious about: The Man Who Saw The Angels Fall (2024), by Christophe Lebold. With the dearth of numerous biographies on our Patron Saint of Sorrow, Song and Redemption, and the City of Montreal, what else might we need to know, might need to be said? The back cover offers: “Leonard Cohen has aimed high: to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Jacob, he struggled with angels. Like David, he sang psalms and seduced women. Like Abraham, he moved from place to place and remained a stranger everywhere. But he never ceased doing what he did best: stepping into avalanches and reviving our hearts.” I’m intrigued by the framing: how Jewish identity, lore and scripture shaped not only Cohen’s work but coincides with his restlessness, two sides of the same coin. As Lebold writes: “That triple calling determined a triple career: that of high-priest, ladies’ man, and poet. The result is a life whose hero is Leonard Cohen. A life that was of course improvised (like all lives) but one that was so naturally dramatic that it seems to have been scripted.”

I have two typed letters circa mid-1990s that Cohen sent me, in response to my queries. One, the most beautifully-phrased no to a request I’d sent him for a poem to include in a benefit anthology of poems I was editing for Insomniac Press as an AIDS fundraiser; the second, a variation on a similar request. I most likely haven’t the capital for permission to quote from either of his letters here. I’ve held them back from my literary archive through an impulse of wishing them to remain mine, still, just a bit longer. However protected they’d remain in my archives at the University of Calgary. This touchstone to my teenaged, guitar-attempting self.

Interesting, to think about Leonard Cohen in this small Quebec town that suggests is named for a Christian Saint but isn’t. Sainte-Adèle, in the Laurentides, founded July 1, 1855, and named by the founder, Augustin-Norbert Morin (1803-1865), after his wife, Adèle Raymond (1818-1889). There has been no specific reference I can find that might speak to her divinity.

*

Our young ladies, kinetic. Earlier, they were at the dining room table playing Snakes and Ladders, then in the yard collecting leaves for the table. Now they request a dictionary from their Oma for a game of scrabble. They seek out words.

“Once / we were children and understood the world.” writes Chris Banks, to close his poem “MY FAVOURITE TOY,” a piece that appears in the second print issue of The Ampersand Review (Summer 2022). “We played dolls. We built cities with books, / then like Gods, watched them collapse.”

In the trees beyond the sunroom, a blue jay chases away sparrows. Holds to their perch.

*

As I’ve been laid flat since yesterday morning, Christine forced to take the wheel for our return drive to Ottawa. Tested positive for Covid-19 today, which cancels my radio appearance today on CBC Radio’s All In A Day, to discuss On Beauty. Within days, the household succumbs.

*

Covid, day four: it has moved through the household. This morning, I hear from The Writers’ Union of Canada that my application was successful, and I will get a small stipend to mentor east coast poet and critic Vanessa Lent on a poetry manuscript. I still recall, moons back, Toronto poet Andy Weaver—then still a graduate student at the University of Alberta during those days, before landing his job at York University—and I reading on the same bill as Vanessa Lent in Vernon, British Columbia through Jason Dewinetz’s Greenboathouse Books reading series. The reading was held in the basement of a historic building once owned by Dewinetz’s maternal grandfather, which once housed a shoe store on the main level. By the lakeshore of his mother’s family cottage, the boathouse-turned-studio, which had been painted deep green.

The summer of 2002, as Weaver and I drove a rental car south from Edmonton to overnight in Calgary, heading straight west into Vernon, even passing the infamous ‘last spike’ at where the east and west threads of national rail finally met. I had no idea the meeting-point was this far west, into the British Columbia interior, just by Golden. In Vernon, where Weaver and I first met Vanessa, and met her uncle, the writer John Lent, who commented on my 1980s-era Matrix magazine t-shirt.

That same drive, visiting Derek Beaulieu when he still lived in Calgary, with the house that had garage converted to studio, the “house” of housepress. The same trip we met ryan fitzpatrick, who had come by Derek’s studio to hang out.

*

We endure, day five. Rose is hit hardest, but she begins to perk up after twenty-four hours. We remain in the house. They miss two days of school.