BY STEVEN W. BEATTIE
RACHEL IDZERDA
“Poetry,” said leonard cohen, “comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers. … [If] I knew where good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” Those words are part of a transcript of Cohen’s address accepting Spain’s Prince Asturias Award in 2011. The speech is included as a coda to The Flame: Poems and Selections from Notebooks, a posthumous collection of Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and artwork brought out this year by McClelland & Stewart.