Simon, thank you for your thoughts and including Siemerling’s essay.
I think that you provided the heart of what we should be concerned with in your prefatory reamarks and excellent quotes.
As others have mentioned, it is a difficult essay (one of the sort that has a tendency to drive people away from scholarly work-which in my mind is a shame, because it is generally not the concepts that are too difficult, but unfortunately the obfusticating manner in which it is presented that often puts people off). I could write an essay on this using Siemerling’s work as an example, but I’ll spare you.
I certainly don’t mean to disparage Siemerling’s efforts as they are quite insightful on a number of issues. Certainly the relationship of LC to a community whether it be the Montreal Jewish community, his relationship with a number of poets, in particular, Klein and Layton, his relationship to his family, all seem manifest in his work particularly in relation to the notion of “exile.”
I will speak to this a little bit later, but wish to discuss a little more about the distinction between “Prophet “ and “Priest” in the speech that Leonard gave that Siemerling references. In the speech, Leonard marks the distinction between speaking to and speaking for . I thought that, perhaps, this distinction could be illustrated somewhat more concretely using Biblical figures. The prophet figure that I most associate with Biblical text is Isaiah, but we really know nothing about the historical Isaiah. In fact, the text was apparently written over a very long period of time by at least three different authors. It would also be prudent to point out that the Biblical term “prophet” really doesn’t imply the modern day meaning of being able to foretell the future. The Biblical prophets were outsiders advocating a more spiritual existence-therefore speaking to the community in an effort to redirect the attention of the community to different (not current) matters. I apologize now for using Christian imagery to illustrate this, but I could not come up with others that seem to work as well as this does. And again, I am certainly not implying that this concept has Christian roots, it does not.
But let’s examine the figure of John the Baptist in Matthew’s gospel dressed in camel’s hair with a leather belt, subsisting on locusts and wild honey living in the desert of Judea and contrast that with the figure of Jesus, wine-drinker, consorter with sinners and prostitutes who had many devoted followers. I would say that this could be a good example of the difference between “prophet” and “priest.” The reason I bring this up is that in addition to its illustrative purposes, it may also reflect the different influences that Klein and Layton had on LC’s work.
Just what you probably want right now is another long, scholarly article to read, but I think that the article titled, “Neurotic Affiliations: Klein, Layton, Cohen, and the Properties of Influence” by Michael Q. Abraham is one of the best for developing an understanding of LC’s early influences. It has been mentioned before here on the Forum and I believe that it was Greg who mentioned that it changed his perspective dramatically. Here is the link:
http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetr ... ations.htm
Here is one of the quotes from LC, concerning Klein: “There was a line--there were different lines which I thought I inherited...the Jewish one, the Montreal Jewish one, the one that connected A. M. Klein to my grandfather and my own family, McGill University, and this consecrated expression of poetry. In A. M. Klein there were a lot of those lines that converged, so he was a very important figure to me, beyond the actual poem on the page.”
Abraham then quotes Cohen on Layton: “I think I became friends with Irving Layton...and if he had exercised that master-student relationship...if Irving did in some secret part of his mind feel that he was giving me instruction, he did it in a most subtle and beautiful way. He did it as a friend, he never made me feel that I was sitting at his feet.”
Now, it may be a bit of a force to say that one was “prophet” and one was “priest” but certainly their influence is strong. Abraham uses this quote as the epigram of the work: “I shouldn’t be in Canada at all. Winter is all wrong for me. I belong beside the Mediterranean. My ancestors made a terrible mistake. But I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations.” The place, of course, where he was returning from was Hydra where he lived in self-imposed exile. The line from the mother in “Night Comes On”-”Go back, go back to the world” was probably uttered in real life by Cohen’s own mother a time or two.
The nature of exile is represented in many different fashions. Certainly for the nation of Israel, it was exile from a place. For Cohen, I suspect that the exile is more pyschic. As Tom pointed out in his discussion of the genesis of the song, “I Can’t Forget”-the line, I was born in chains” didn’t ring true with Leonard. He was born in relative comfort and prosperity while during the same timeframe the reality of the Holocaust was visited upon the Jews of Europe. So it was only an arbitrary accident of birth that separated LC from the many who were chained into the cattle cars. Abraham discusses the poetic implications of this and in fact, contends that it was the reality and horror the Holocaust that drove Klein to madness and silence. If one contrasts this with the self-imposed exile, think of the lines, "I tried in my way to be free" or "I came so far for beauty, I left so much behind," one can see that there is perhaps a psychic pressure that is building which will eventually take its toll on the author.
It has taken me a long time to read the articles and write this and now many other things have been brought up in the thread, I will let others comment on the articles, but one quick aside to Tom regarding the numbering of the Psalms-I note that in Stranger Music, he refers to them by their first lines.
Doron, I will look forward to your thoughts on the “Prophet”-”Priest” and, of course, your thoughts on “Exile.” You may wish to get to some different psalms before discussing this and I’ll certainly understand, but hopefully my bringing this up now will be a foreshadowing. I have to undergo a minor eye procedure tomorrow which will probably keep me away from the computer for several days. So I’ll see you all later.
Joe
. No time at this moment, with oppressive work overload, but I'll be back... and trust you'll be standing there, as Buber was outside the 'synagogue' looking to converse with those who were interested and willing 
.