The Leonard Cohen memorial postage stamp

Here are photos of a Canada Post delivery truck advertising new postage stamps in memory of Leonard Cohen. I have never really been a fan of Leonard Cohen's poetry but I do like some of his songs; Leonard Cohen has written some of the best popular music since 1970. But for a great poem made into a song listen to Patrick Kavanaugh's "Raglan Road", sung by Van Morrison, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, and a few others; what a great lyrical, emotionally moving, and loving poem. It takes a great poet to write about love, unrequited love, romantic love, or sexual love. Cohen is a great song writer, along with Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and, best of all, Van Morrison. But Cohen is not a great poet, Kavanaugh is a great poet. "Suzanne" is a great song, one of Cohen's better songs, but placed beside Kavanaugh's "Raglan Road", Cohen's "Suzanne is only a good song; it's Patrick Kavanaugh's poem that I keep returning to. Poetry trumps song writing.

Updated on 25 December 2021

From Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh

I am always shy of calling myself a poet and I wonder much at those
young men and sometimes old men who boldly declare their poeticality.
If you ask them what they are, they say: Poet.

There is, of course, a poetic movement which sees poetry
materialistically. The writers of this school see no transcendent
nature in the poet; they are practical chaps, excellent technicians.
But somehow or other I have a belief in poetry as a mystical thing,
and a dangerous thing.

A man (I am thinking of myself) innocently dabbles in words and rhymes
and finds that it is his life. Versing activity leads him away from
the paths of conventional happiness. For reasons that I have never
been able to explain, the making of verses has changed the course of
one man's destiny. I could have been as happily unhappy as the
ordinary countryman in Ireland. I might have stayed at the same moral
age all my life. Instead of that, poetry made me a sort of outcast.
And I was abnormally normal.

                --Patrick Kavanagh
                   Author's Note, page xiii
                   Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems
                   Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, London, 1972

From a poem by Patrick Kavanagh

Living room at 4350 Montclair Avenue

. . . posterity has no use
For anything but the soul

        --Patrick Kavanagh
        "If Ever You Go to Dublin Town"