Leonard Cohen: PARASITES OF HEAVEN

Jokermen

The Jokermen hosts Evan and Ian continue their deep dive into Leonard Cohen's literary output by examining his fourth poetry collection, Parasites of

Key takeaways

• Parasites of Heaven (1966) serves as a transitional archive, containing poems dating back to the 1950s alongside works written immediately after Beautiful Losers.
• Cohen's stylistic signature involves placing paltry or ugly details next to grand spiritual concepts, a technique that later evolved into his songwriting lyrics.

Main topics

• Leonard Cohen poetry analysis
• Parasites of Heaven publication context

Notable quotes

"The sky is not satisfied with the smudges of your character. It demands stories."

Conclusion

This episode provides a nuanced look at a critically overlooked Cohen

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:32) Welcome back to Jokerman Podcasts, presenting Leonard Cohen Poetry Podcast. I'm Evan. Speaker 4 (0:40) I'm Ian. Speaker 4 (0:42) It's getting more arcane and verbose every time. Jokerman Podcast presents Poetry Podcast of Leonard Cohen by Jokerman. I'm Evan. I'm Ian. Speaker 2 (0:53) Yeah, something like that. Speaker 4 (0:55) Yeah. We just did it. It's going to be the last one of these for a little while. Poetry Podcast, at least. Speaker 2 (1:03) Because Speaker 4 (1:03) we've got, I guess just to clarify for everyone out there, all the persnickety-peats and so on in the audience. You know the persnickety-peats. We love them. We know them. Speaker 2 (1:17) You Speaker 4 (1:17) know, just the folks out there, the sticklers. Parasites of Heaven, technically published after Beautiful Losers, which we have not done yet. We will do immediately after this. Both books came out in 1966. Beautiful Losers came out earlier in the year, Parasites of Heaven later. Speaker 2 (1:38) But this is like a Bob Dylan basement tapes type scenario. Yeah. In a way. Speaker 4 (1:45) I figured it was appropriate for a couple reasons. One, like, I just need a little more time with Beautiful Losers. It's a bit of a slog, I'll be honest. I Speaker 2 (1:54) haven't Speaker 4 (1:54) started yet. I'm going to Speaker 2 (1:55) just really sit Speaker 4 (1:56) down and... You better get going on that one, my friend. I'm Speaker 2 (1:59) going to do it. I'm going to force myself to do it in a couple of sittings. Just pop a Speaker 4 (2:04) couple of Vyvanse and settle down for the day. That's like the Speaker 2 (2:08) 4D experience. That's the Speaker 4 (2:10) true authentic experience. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 2 (2:12) I'm going to just sit in the direct sunlight, take a Tabivacet or two, fast for 20 days. Sit on a Speaker 4 (2:20) bench on Sunset Boulevard with no shade. and then pop a couple of I-Vants and just dig in and start having three-dimensional, ahistorical visions of Catherine Tecaquitha. Speaker 2 (2:34) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know enough about, I know that name. Speaker 4 (2:40) Anyways, we'll get there soon, but Parasites of Heaven is, frankly, a relatively slim volume by Leonard, and it does, as you were mentioning along the lines of the basement tapes type thing, it... Contains writing from before Flowers for Hitler, from before Spicebox of Earth, all the way back to the 50s, in fact. So it's not, I think Beautiful Losers is a very strong snapshot of where he is at circa 1965, 66, immediately before he decides to become Leonard Cohen, musician. And so I think Parasites of Heaven makes sense to just, we'll do it. We'll touch on it. We'll take a look at a couple of the poems right now. Then we'll set aside some dedicated time for Beautiful Losers. And then right after that, boom, songs of Leonard Cohen, the first record. And I think that'll be a strong thematic one-two punch there. So Persnickety Pete's, you've been forewarned. Speaker 2 (3:36) How about this book, Parasites of Heaven? How about it? What's your cover look like, first of all? I've Speaker 4 (3:43) got another one of the McClelland issues here from good old Canada. Speaker 2 (3:49) He looks exasperated from that cover. Speaker 4 (3:51) He's doing face poem on the cover on this one. Basically, yeah. It's like, oh man, I gotta do this shit again. I gotta write more fucking poems. Put them out. Speaker 4 (4:02) Honestly, I'm digging the graphic design of these slim paperback volumes here with these weird... It's like a turquoise aqua blue and then like a orange red lava color and then these little purple stripes on the side. It's sort of an odd color collection, but I'm finding it sort of attractive. Yes, Speaker 2 (4:23) the color stories of these editions, it's kind of hip. Speaker 2 (4:30) These odd combinations, that's kind of like a hip combo these days. And you've got the Speaker 4 (4:37) stark black and white photograph of Leonard here, just like we had on Hitler, and just like we had on Let Us Compare Mythologies from this edition, at least. Do you have the new version of, like the fresh version, which is black with red? Speaker 2 (4:50) It's also McClelland and Stewart, actually. But yeah, it's the, I suppose, most recent paperback version. Speaker 2 (4:59) It's got just a black cover, Leonard Cohen, Parasites of Heaven, Leonard Cohen in white, Parasites of Heaven in red, and in the bottom corner, the small. Speaker 2 (5:12) seal symbols, you know, the kanji seal and also the, what's it called? The unified heart symbol. Speaker 4 (5:21) It's a star of David, but it's hearts instead of triangles. Speaker 2 (5:24) Well, it's the Leonard Cohen symbol. You Speaker 4 (5:26) had that as your profile picture for a while. Speaker 2 (5:29) Yeah, I did until we started actually doing this. And then you took it away. Speaker 4 (5:33) Now you have a different Leonard Cohen logo as your profile picture? Speaker 2 (5:37) A more obscure one, yeah. The dancing couple. Yes. Great logo. It's cute. That one. This is sort of like when I moved in with my girlfriend and there was this big, big halftone print Bob Dylan, like black and white on the cover of Blonde on Blonde that I had and it was framed. Did you get rid of Speaker 4 (6:04) it? Speaker 2 (6:04) Well, it was hanging at my girlfriend's apartment. And when it became my apartment as well, it was kind of mutually decided that we would put something else up because it's just like, it was kind of cute when it wasn't my place, but it was there. But Speaker 4 (6:23) now, Speaker 2 (6:23) you know, then it became like, all right. It's a little much if I'm talking about Bob Dylan and I've got the giant Bob Dylan. It's like when somebody's got a profile picture on a YouTube comment that is also about, it's like of the comment. You know, it'd be like a Bob Dylan video, the Bob Dylan profile picture. Then their tag, their name is also like Bobby Z forever. And then they're just like, I love you, Bob. Speaker 4 (6:53) Well. You're talking to someone who's broadcasting from his office, who's got a Strokes poster behind him, a poster from the David Berman event we did a couple years ago right to my left, Van Morrison. Somebody tried to sell me a bridge print right next to my window. Important Speaker 2 (7:10) words, your office. Speaker 4 (7:11) Uh-huh. Oh. Which is, Speaker 2 (7:13) in our arrangement at this point, before... There Speaker 4 (7:17) is no such room. Speaker 2 (7:18) We're going to move, but yeah, no, it's the office and the... The living room or kind of sharing space. Yeah. Speaker 4 (7:26) This is the man's podcasting domicile here. I envy Speaker 2 (7:30) you and your dojo. It's pretty nice. Speaker 4 (7:34) Yeah. I got a lot of Bob stuff behind me. I got a signed Al Jardine photograph. I got the John Cale hockey masks that we did in the event at Gold Diggers Inn. Right. I got a little pornography posted above my computer. It's classy. Speaker 2 (7:48) You're going to have to explain that a little bit. What do you mean? Speaker 4 (7:50) I mean, it's a drawing of a naked woman that's just mounted, tacked right up to the wall right here. It's a Vargas drawing. You know the Vargas girls? I don't think so. You would know. Like the cover of a Cars record. Oh, yeah. Yeah, those are the Vargas girls. Wait, do you mean Vargas? Google Vargas girl. Speaker 2 (8:10) Oh, okay. Cars. They're these, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's like pin-up drawings. Speaker 4 (8:15) Exactly. Classic that the artist Vargas, I think it's a pen name, did for the Playboys and the Esquires, you know, mid-60s and stuff. Speaker 2 (8:23) I think that's just a shade shy of pornography. Well, the one Speaker 4 (8:28) that I'm looking at, she's fully nude. So, you know. All right, I take it back. Anyways, you know, appropriate for Leonard Cohen series, staring at a beautiful naked woman the entire time I'm podcasting. Parasites of Heaven, how about that? Speaker 2 (8:43) Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. That's a very astute point. This is, well, the most interesting thing about this. is probably the formal quirk that this particular volume has. Speaker 2 (9:01) Well, it's just that there's no... Titles. It's just page after page of... whatever the next thing is. And you kind of have to use your careful attention to note when one page is a continuation of the previous and when it's a brand new thing. And also, you know, it'll say like the date after it at sometimes. Speaker 4 (9:26) Confusingly, some of them have the year and some of them do not. Speaker 2 (9:31) So the index in the back is just, for mine, it's an alphabetical order of the first lines. And I found this to be kind of interesting. at first slightly annoying but by the end I was kind of like you know hey it's kind of I don't know it's a touch that I think is a little bit um worth thinking about I think it does something kind of funny which is that with a poetry collection Speaker 2 (10:03) you kind of have, you know, the, the option, I guess, of reading one poem and not the next, you can be like, ah, that one's too long or this one's has a better title. And here it's like, you're in it or you're not, you're either reading this thing or you're putting it down. Cause you have really no choice in the matter of like, Oh, I want to read that poem. I mean, you do after a while, but... For me, I found the experience kind of like a little bit more engrossing, maybe. Speaker 2 (10:43) By the way, that it sort of demands you just... read the damn thing. Interesting. Have Speaker 4 (10:49) you not just been reading the collections like one poem after the other? Speaker 2 (10:54) I have, but sometimes I'll pick it, you know, I'll put it down or I'll flip around through it and I'll just kind of like, I've read all the poems, but I do kind of like just being able to flip through a book of poems sometimes and pick one at random. Speaker 2 (11:13) Anyway, that's just all there is to say, I suppose, about that quirk. Speaker 4 (11:42) was markedly different from where he had been previously, Spicebox of Earth. You know, not every single poem necessarily, but as we talked about on those episodes, a lot of the allusions, a lot of the religious iconography, a lot of the longer, more detailed types of poems had been... pared back and really, you know, stripped down to their bare essentials. You know, I think a much more contemporary voice had begun to emerge with Flowers for Hitler. And in conjunction with that, he took a more outward-looking view, I think, with a lot of the poems, you know, deliberately writing about the world as he saw it, as he lived it in 1963, 1964. Obviously, the conversations about the Dachau generation and so on were central to that collection. And it felt like it had a real kind of political valence to it, I think, much more so than the first couple collections. And Parasites of Heaven, to me, is not really that. I don't know about you. But it is, and I guess it's partially that because it includes older poems, which again, we know from some of the dates at the end of some of these that go back again to the 1950s. But it's not exactly a return to the first couple volumes of poetry, I would say. But I think it is a more... a little more personally invested, and a little more, you know, less of a statement piece, I think, than where we last saw him here. And so it's sort of a curious collection, I think, for all those reasons. It's also significant, you know, for the notable reason, as I'm sure you saw, for the inclusion of literally a couple what will become Leonard Cohen songs. Speaker 4 (13:54) Yes. You've got, I think, maybe Master Song, something else. Fingertips. Yeah. Speaker 2 (14:02) So Speaker 4 (14:03) it's, I don't know, that was another interesting little bit to connect with it. I'm a little, baffled would be too strong a word, I would say, but I am a little confused about this collection, quite honestly. I've tried to do research into this. There's very little writing about it. There's like no biography to deliver along with this. It just came out right after Beautiful Losers. You know, there's not like a special section in the Sylvie Simmons book, as far as I could see, at least. And like, it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, Parasites of Heaven. So that's typically a signal that it's not something that is overly, you know, significant, at least to the culture at large. So we're going to do our best to get into it and see what we can find out here. But it is, it's a bit of a footnote, I think, probably the most of the things that we've encountered so far in the Leonard Cohen series. Speaker 2 (14:59) Well, except for ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, perhaps. Speaker 4 (15:03) Yeah, but that wasn't even a Leonard. Like, Leonard Cohen's not the author of that film. When I'm discussing, when I'm talking about it there, I'm talking about the actual things that bear, you know, authorship of Leonard Cohen. True, yes. Speaker 2 (15:15) I do find it interesting that it exists as something that just kind of came out right after Beautiful Losers. If I were to hazard a guess, I would guess that he was maybe feeling like, okay. Speaker 2 (15:32) I want to kind of retroactively prove that I am not just like coming out of nowhere and a flash in the pan by including and handpicking certain things from his earliest days. I think it's a little bit of mythology insurance of like, by the way. Been at this for a little while. And even when I was just a boy, a wee lad, I was writing. Speaker 2 (16:10) insightful and surprising poems about sex and death and mystery. Speaker 4 (16:18) Yeah. Speaker 2 (16:18) Although honestly, I Speaker 4 (16:19) don't see like the sex stuff is, is here in a couple poems a little bit, but it's, it's still dialed down quite a bit from where it was in the first couple collections. I think he Speaker 2 (16:33) got it all out of his system, so to Speaker 4 (16:35) speak. With Beautiful Speaker 2 (16:36) Losers. Speaker 4 (16:36) With Speaker 2 (16:36) Beautiful Losers, maybe. He was just like, that's one prolonged jizzing of just busting out all of that energy onto the page. For better or for worse. Blackening the page, whitening the page. Whitening the Speaker 4 (16:50) page, yeah, exactly. All right, well, let's hit a couple of these poems here. Shaui, do you want to kick us off with one? Yeah, let's Speaker 2 (16:57) do that. Speaker 2 (17:01) Okay, here's one I picked kind of at random. Speaker 2 (17:06) Here was the harbor, crowded with white ships, the gulls showing how much silver there was in the sunlight as they fell out of the sky. like handfuls of polished rice, or climbed in smoky squadrons at the sun until their wings turned silver and they descended again to astonish the floating garbage. Speaker 2 (17:32) Who doesn't give his heart to things that soar, kites or jet planes, or a sharp distant sail? I tried to give more than my heart. I tried to yield my loathing, my ambition, all my tiny sicknesses. I tried to give away a new desire which I had hardly suspected, but which was growing violently in the metal sunlight like a germ culture. suddenly surrounded by its own ideal conditions. The gulls continued their cold acrobatics and refused to bear the smudges of my uneasiness. I think that more than hunger, the sky was their master. They performed for the endless blue sky, confetti for some vast ceremony, an eternal wedding. Give what you want to the gulls. The sky is not satisfied with the smudges of your character. It demands stories. Of men the sky demands all manner of stories, entertainments, embroideries, just as it does of its stars and constellations. The sky does not care for this trait or that affliction. It wants the whole man, lost in his story, abandoned in the mechanics of action, touching his fellows, leaving them, hunting the steps, dancing the old circles. The sky wants diagrams of our lives. It stores them like little curious wristwatches. They are our wedding gifts. I think that one's quite good. Yeah, that was Speaker 4 (19:12) one of Speaker 2 (19:12) the Speaker 4 (19:12) ones that I had highlighted myself. Speaker 2 (19:15) And I kind of wish I knew when that one was written, but that is one that doesn't have a little date next to it. Presumably it's, I mean, it seems clear that it's Hydra. Yeah, exactly. Here's Speaker 4 (19:26) the harbor crowded with white ships, the gold showing how much silver there was in the sunlight as they fell out of the sky. Speaker 2 (19:33) Yeah. It's Speaker 4 (19:34) a Speaker 2 (19:34) very nice poem. I kind of found myself doing like a, an accidental ranking system of the poems. Like as I went, I just had a pencil and wrote a star. Speaker 4 (19:47) Okay. One star, two star, three star. I Speaker 2 (19:49) didn't mean to do