“Leonard Cohen is Starving!”

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

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.

Build your own Montreal smoked meat sandwich at 6:45 p.m..
 

About the Presenter

Lucas Crawford, PhD

Lucas Crawford is from rural Nova Scotia. Presently, he is full professor and Canada Research Chair of Transgender Creativity and Mental Health at the University of Alberta (Augustana). He also leads “Rewriting Ourselves: Poetry in the Psych Ward,” a large mad-led and collaborative pilot project that has recently begun to offer poetry workshops in four Alberta psychiatric wards. Lucas is the author of Transgender Architectonics (Routledge 2016), and of four poetry books, including Belated Bris of the Brainsick (Nightwood 2019) and Muster Points (U of Calgary 2023). Lucas’s art and research focus on transgender, disability and eating – especially on their literary and artistic histories. In January 2025, he was a musician in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In January 2007, as a grad student at the University of Alberta, he organized “Alberta Beef,” a popular drag king troupe.

Artwork by Kelly Mellings. Caricature by Morgan Sea.