Leonard Cohen’s career is unique, the only poet and novelist who became a rock star. His career peaked in his eighth decade, and his popularity is perhaps still growing ten years after his death. Despite his popularity, Cohen remains something of a mystery, a man of many facets and not a few contradictions. The papers in this session will examine Cohen’s work and its impact in four contexts that in their diversity demonstrate its range and significance. Cohen's fiction and poetry have been treated in the context of Canadian literature, but his songs and lyrics have not been much discussed in this way. The relationship of Cohen to cinema, Montreal, and to the singer-songwriters have not been the focus of significant scholarly work. The session will include four speakers who will speak for 14 minutes, leaving time for introductions and at least 15 minutes of discussion. Ian Rae’s paper examines Cohen’s work in relation to Canadian literature. “Canadians are desperate for a Keats,” proclaimed the narrator of Cohen’s novel The Favorite Game, and Cohen himself seems to have been the poet designated to fill that role. The poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton were his first mentors, and he was celebrated specifically for his contributions to Canadian literature. Cohen was a member of a renaissance of Canadian literature in the second half of the twentieth century, including near-contemporaries, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. Cohen’s literary executors underscore Cohen’s status as a poet first and foremost, but it was as songwriter and performer that Cohen would leave the small pond of Canadian literature on a quest to harness the power of song and the machinery of celebrity culture to refocus public attention on the word. Cohen began writing songs just as folk as a commercial medium was receding and the singer-songwriter movement beginning. Cohen is clearly one of the first singer-songwriters, but he is not typical of the movement because his songs are not in the main confessional. David Shumway’s paper looks at Cohen’s work in relation to confessional poets like Lowell and Plath, and confessional songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. Like the confessional poets, the singer-songwriters were defined by their direct address, seeming to reveal their very souls in the details of their misdeeds. Cohen was an important early influence on Mitchell, who was the inspiration for several of her most important songs. His songs often have a sense direct address, and they do sometimes draw on his private life. And yet, his songs generally point away from the singer to something larger, as the song “Suzanne” illustrates. In 1971, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder used Cohen’s songs for Beware of a Holy Whore. That same year Robert Altman chose to use four songs from Cohen’s first album for the soundtrack of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. While Cohen himself is nowhere to be seen on screen, his persona—dark, mysterious, rebellious, poetic—merges with that of the eponymous John McCabe’s to create a composite character forged by music and cinema. Far from being an afterthought, the music is the heart of the film. Since then, Cohen’s songs have been used in over 300 films and TV episodes. “Hallelujah” has been used prominently in numerous films and television episodes including Shrek, The West Wing, and Saturday Night Live. Cohen was also directly involved in the production of several films, including I Am a Hotel (1983), which features the surreal interactions of several sets of lovers at a hotel. Erin MacLeod’s paper discusses Cohen’s relationship to Montreal, where he was born and grew up. As an Anglophone Jew who lived in the politically distinct community of Westmount, Cohen was always a bit of an outsider, who became more of one when he spent most of his adult live living abroad. While Montreal was central to his development as a writer and figures prominently in his early poems and in his fiction, most of the songs for which he most well-known do not refer to the city. It’s therefore ironic that he appears to have changed the world’s perspectives on his hometown, and perhaps changed the way that Montreal sees itself. Cohen’s position as secular saint and established hagiography allows the city to transcend language issues, because even though Cohen was bilingual, he is not Francophone. The panelists reflect a diversity of disciplinary specialties--Canadian literature, popular music, film, and ethnic studies, and of careers status. Two are tenured professors, one an adjunct professor and journalist, and another a museum professional.