"Leonard Cohen is Starving!"

Readers of Michael Posner’s recent 1,488-page oral history of beloved poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen know that his closest friends were able to see a different side of the fedora-capped crooner in black who was known, to his chagrin, as a ladies’ man. One reported that Cohen was hospitalized after a twelve-day fast; another saw him arising from a bathtub in a Vancouver hotel and described his physique as that of a concentration camp survivor; another describes him as having “a lifelong obsession with his weight.” Cohen, for his part, was very open across his diverse oeuvre about his feelings about his body and its hungers: “food tastes good but I’d rather not eat,” he wrote frankly.

What to make of this disjunction between sexy lothario and self-loathing? This lecture avoids the excessive drawbacks of more obvious responses (say, pathologizing Cohen’s chaotic hungers, or demonizing his discomfort with fatness) to instead gather together a number of contexts to keep Cohen’s hunger company. These contexts, still unfolding, are mine too: the ongoing confluence between antisemitism and fatphobia; the persistent disinclination in our culture to admit men’s suffering with regard to self-image and body composition; questions of Jewish masculinity; Jewish intergenerational grief and mental disability; Canadian antisemitism; and more. Those hoping for queer and trans content will not be disappointed, as I will call on my own poetry to show how Cohen’s hungers can matter to us in a real way in 2025.

This in person event will take place in the Mayer Family Hall at the Jeanne & Peter Lougheed Performing Arts Centre in Camrose. Note that attendees will be invited to build your own Montreal Smoked Meat Sandwich at 6:45!

Content to expect: representations of disordered eating and violence; coarse language; frank discussions of gender and sexuality