as we all remember

I decided I wanted to write poems on July 16th, 1999. I was sitting in my parents’ living room in Chester, Nova Scotia. It was four fifteen in the afternoon (this is Atlantic time); I was helping friends to put on a play that week but had the day free until my call time. My mother was listening to a news article about the decision to rebury the Romanovs. Our dog was sick, but would eventually get better.

I was reading my mother’s copy of Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems – the M&S one from 1968 with the three heads on the cover – specifically the longish poem “Disguises,” which as we all remember started on page 168 of that book, specifically the two lines near the middle that read “Goodbye, articulate monsters./Abbott & Costello have met Frankenstein.” and these two lines gave me that peculiar mix of reactions I keep coming back to poems to find. To be baffled and laid bare how something that stupendous could be that easy to say.

The poem was profound but self-apparent, it was clearly a constructed object but it felt so casual and so easy. It, and another couple hundred poems since then that I consider my personal canon, was a magic box. A fifteen-year-old theatre nerd is surely a mark for a poem as angry and self-possessed and musical as “Disguises.” “Goodbye, articulate monsters” is a teenager’s phrase. It’s not my favourite poem anymore but I do owe it a great deal.

It rained that day in Nova Scotia. I don’t know if it rained or not in Toronto, where I live now.

- Jacob McArthur Mooney, with a very specific answer to a generic question, in interview with All Lit Up. You can read the whole thing here.