Cohen for Nobel Laureate!

North of the border, CBC broadcaster Paul Kennedy is spearheading a campaign to promote Leonard Cohen for a Nobel Prize in Literature. It's not known how susceptible the Swedish Academy is to persuasion--only the Peace Prize takes outside nominations, and it's assumed that the committees for the other prizes routinely ignore any external influence. Still, an argument can be made for Cohen deserving of the honor.

In conjunction with the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, Kennedy organized a public forum to discuss the issue, which was later broadcast on his CBC radio show, Ideas. You can listen to the program here, and it's worth your time if you've got 55 minutes.

Unfortunately, Kennedy was not as well served in a segment on Public Radio International's The World. The introduction to Derek Stoffel's piece there set the tone that this was not an effort to be taken seriously:

Past winners include Kipling, Camus, Hemingway, Yeats, and Bellow. Only the world's greatest authors can lay claim to having won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But now, a campaign is underway in Canada to award the prize to someone who doesn't seem to belong in that company.

It's not that Leonard Cohen isn't a gifted writer. He certainly is. It's just that people think of him as a tunesmith as much as a wordsmith.

Stoffel did nothing to offset that tone when he took over the microphone: "Listening to Leonard Cohen, it's hard not to agree that he's not a singer . . . he's a poet who allows his poems to come alive as songs. But is this Nobel Prize winning material?"

The quotes they chose to use from Kennedy didn't do him any favors, either. Cohen's songs, the broadcaster said, "sort of provided punctuation to periods of my life--that make him a profound influence," coming across as though he believed the Nobel Prize was all about him. Kennedy has an ability to put words together, but you wouldn't know it from this: "There's something--if you could define that you can define what greatness is, what genius is, what poetry is. But he's managed somehow to make words fit together--very simple words--fit together in a way that is totally profound and affecting."

In closing his report, Stoffel found a forty-year-old Cohen quote suggesting that he wouldn't want a Nobel Prize, anyway:

Well, ah, I think that history and time pretty well builds obselecense [sic] into poetry, unless it's really, really the great stuff, and you don't know if you're hitting that. Sometimes you know about it. Sometimes it has a kind of ring. But I'm not interested in posterity. I like the stuff I do to have that kind of horizontal immediacy rather than something that is going to be around for a long time. I'm not interested in an insurance plan for my work.

Does Cohen still feel that way? He'd have to tell us. But points of view shift over time. If my memory's correct, wasn't Pete Townshend hoping to die before he got old at about the same time? He seems to have changed his mind--maybe Cohen has, too.