Leonard Cohen: Working Steady

NOTE: this is an unrevised version of an entry from my old blog from August 26th, 2016   

Leonard Cohen just published an unpunctuated poem with the following lines:

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I was always working steady

But I never called it art

I was funding my depression

Meeting Jesus reading Marx

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I assume he means:

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I was always working steady,

But I never called it art.

I was funding my depression,

Meeting Jesus reading Marx.

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Rather than:

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I was always working steady,

But I never called it art.

I was funding my depression,

Meeting Jesus, reading Marx.

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The ambiguity in the poem, in a few places, is Cohen’s little joke on us (if you can’t see it look in the kitchen).  But it’s satisfying that the man we have long thought of as an old troubadour is doing the proper troubadour thing.  The poem was just published an hour or so ago, but I already like it.

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I may post about it again when I have had time to think on it a little.