I don't recall where I purchased Leonard Cohen's Selected
Poems 1956-1968. Maybe it was the old 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich
Village. I know that his poem "Suzanne Takes You Down" was a
favorite of mine, sung by Judy Collins when my high school friends and
I looked over our shoulders at the Vietnam War, racial turmoil, and all
those other things we associated with the adult world. I purchased Cohen's
book because I was haunted by the reference to Jesus being a sailor.
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Cohen's
poem was very sensual to a young person like me. I think my coming of
age could be measured by my strong desire to find someone who could feed
me "tea and oranges / that come all the way from China." I hummed
Cohen's work while writing a few poems that were influenced more by Bob
Dylan and Phil Ochs than by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. I had
made no decision to become a writer; there was no urgency behind expressing
myself. In fact, poetry was not even a possibility.
As the sixties ended, my parents found enough money to send me off to
college. I attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and during
my sophomore year enrolled in a class called "Blues, Soul and Black
Identity," taught by the literary critic Stephen Henderson. He became
one of my earlier mentors, but there was another teacher in the class:
her name was Susan Thomas, and she became the embodiment of first love.
Her name became inextricably linked with Cohen's verse. I found myself
walking across campus and changing into a man.
I knew the words to "Suzanne Takes You Down," though not much
about Leonard Cohen. A cousin gave me a copy of his novel The Favorite
Game, but Cohen was not my favorite writer; he had written just one
wonderful poem. In the back of his Selected Poems, I discovered
"You Do Not Have to Love Me" and sent copies of it to friends.
But this second poem was like a mistress, an affair that didn't last.
I was in love with "Suzanne," and the poem acquired an even
deeper meaning for me as I grew older.
When my brother Richard died in his sleep in 1985, I found myself once
again tasting the words of Cohen's poem in my mouth; this time it absorbed
grief and loss. I looked upon my brother's death, which had engulfed sadness
and depression, and knew that "he himself was broken / long before
the sky would open." In this poem, Cohen writes about saviors, and
perhaps this is why I keep returning to it. Something in it continues
to haunt me. I keep waiting for Suzanne to appear, and to disappear, and
to believe that this too has something to do with love.
___________
Would you
like to know more about E. Ethelbert Miller's poetry?
Read a recent
interview with the poet in The Metropolitan Review.
Return
to First Loves
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