Leonard Cohen with Adrienne Clarkson at the Canadian Songwriters hall of Fame Gala at the John Bassett Theatre in Toronto, 2006.Jim Ross/The Globe and Mail
An artist looking for a champion could do worse than having one as substantial as Adrienne Clarkson. The journalist and former Governor-General of Canada has long beat the drums for the late Leonard Cohen, who was a friend and some time interviewee. He’s the subject of Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, a documentary by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller that screens on Oct. 30 at Toronto’s Innis Town Hall Theatre as part this year’s Ageless International Film Festival.
Clarkson, who appears in the film, is one of the panelists set to appear in a post-screening discussion moderated by Andrew Burashko, the leader of the Art of Time Ensemble, which recently gave a series of concerts that celebrated the songs of Cohen. Clarkson spoke at those performances. She also made the 1989 documentary Leonard and delivered an address at a 2018 symposium related to a Cohen exhibition at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
In short, when it comes to great Canadian troubadours, Cohen is her man.
Since Leonard Cohen’s death in 2016 there have been a number of books and films about him, along with two posthumous albums. He’s not going quietly, is he now?
[Laughs] He’ll never go quietly. He’s eternal, as we’ve come to realize.
That’s interesting, because in your televised interview with him for CBC’s Take 30 in 1966, he said he wasn’t interested in posterity, which he considered a paltry form of eternity. Was he an honest interview subject, or did he project a persona?
I think Leonard was one of the most real and defined people that I have ever met.
How do we define him? In your interview he said, ‘I just like to sing.’
Cohen with his guitar ready to go out on Tour in the late-2000s.Courtesy of the Cohen Estate / Mongrel Media
I heard from an anthropologist once who said that we basically sang to each other originally. That’s what poetry is, and Leonard brought us back to that through his songs and the music. He had a great sense of mission about that, and a compulsion. He said he wanted to sing what he thought was true.
What set him apart?
He was so far ahead, as all poets are. They’re prophets. They’re far ahead compared to the way normal people think about history or what life is.
How did he rate himself as a singer-songwriter?
I never talked about him assessing his own songwriting. Our friendship did not resolve itself around his work in that way.
Your presentation at a Montreal symposium in 2018 was titled Leonard Cohen As I Knew Him. Can you condense that address for me?
It would take more than a few sentences. He is the greatest poet we have ever produced. It would be very hard to mention anyone who could match him in terms of the poetry, because it’s sung. And because it is a song, we all can remember it in a way that you don’t memorize poetry. You can memorize songs because the rhythm carries you along. I think he would be very happy to think that we remember him in that way.
Was he happy? You talked about happiness in your 1966 interview.
Did we? I should look at it again. I see clips on YouTube. It makes me laugh and laugh because I feel I was very naive and because we were so ridiculously young. But as far as Leonard being happy, I don’t think he would think in those kinds of categories. He was not that kind of Sixties person.
If not happy, how should he be remembered?
He wanted to think of himself as a poet writing the words people would remember and that would express for other people what they couldn’t express themselves. He was the true poet-bard in that sense, and that’s what poets do. They express for us what we can’t express for ourselves, but we know when we hear it that it’s quite simply true.
The Ageless International Film Festival runs to Oct. 30; information at agelessfilmfestival.org
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Brad Wheeler