Canadian Poets 1

CANADIAN POETS 1

"Canadian Poets 1", a double LP, was released in 1966 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Phyllis Webb, Earle Birney, John Newlove, Alfred Purdy, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, George Bowering, and Gwendolyn Macewen read some of their own poems.

Leonard Cohen reads the following poems:

1. What I'm Doing Here
2. You Have the Lovers
3. Now of Sleeping
4. Style
5. Two Went to Sleep
6. Nothing Has Been Broken
7. These Heroics

Poems 1-3 from The Spice-box of Earth (1961)
Poem 4 from Flowers of Hitler (1964)
Poems 5-7 from Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956)

Robert McCormack wrote this introduction in 1966:

"Ten years or so ago when he (Cohen) was in his late 'teens there was a tendency to regard Leonard Cohen as a disciple of Mr. Layton's. They shared, after all, their Jewishness and their Montreal background, and, inevitably, they knew one another. Mr. Cohen, however, soon proved that he was no one's disciple except his own, moving through the richly sensual texture of his early verse - he is perhaps too well known as one of the most lyrically sensous love poets of our time - to the hard-edged surrealistic vision of the contemporary world presented with almost hallucinatory force in Flowers for Hitler. Mr. Cohen, whose extraordinary lyrical gift has always driven him towards music, has recently been writing songs for the rock group The Stormy Clovers."

Cohen's photo from the album cover