Judy Collins Turn, Turn, Turns to Poetry
Where the Time Goes Dept.The eighty-five-year-old folksinger, who is about to publish a book of poems, chats about her old friends (Leonard Cohen and Lily Tomlin) and her Persian cats (Tom Wolfe and Rachmaninoff).By Sarah LarsonFebruary 24, 2025Illustration by João FazendaIn March, Judy Collins, the ethereal, blue-eyed folksinging legend, will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday with a concert at Town Hall and the release of a book. “I tell people that I’m eighty-five and it’s the new twenty-seven,” Collins said on a recent morning. Her hair is now short and white, her vibe eternally beatific. She showed a visitor around her sunny, colorful, maximalist Upper West Side apartment, where she has lived for fifty-five years, full of evidence of a robust and Zelig-like life. In a hallway, a photograph of Collins on the set of “Sesame Street,” with the Muppets (“I sang an aria with Snuffleupagus”), and gold and platinum records, framed; in the dining room, an Al Hirschfeld portrait of Collins in “Peer Gynt” at the Delacorte, in 1969, wide-eyed and looming over Stacy Keach. “I played the long-suffering Solveig,” she said. “The songs were by John Morris, who wrote music for Mel Brooks movies, like ‘Blazing Saddles.’ ” A recent note from her friend Bill Clinton sat on a table; Collins performed at his inaugural gala in 1993. Once, while staying at the White House, Collins knocked her travel-coffee setup off the bathroom sink. “There I was in the middle of the night, cleaning up coffee grounds in the Lincoln Bedroom,” she said. “In the morning, they brought me the most wonderful coffee.”She glided past a sculpture of the Buddha topped with a Viking helmet and proceeded into a splendiferous living room: a mint-green floral diptych, beautifully eerie Walton Ford bird paintings, plants and Tiffany lamps galore, couches piled with needlepoint pillows (“TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING IS WONDERFUL”). Two Persian cats exuded fluffy gravitas. “The white one is Tom Wolfe, and Rachmaninoff is hovering somewhere,” Collins said. She bent to stroke Tom Wolfe’s head, then sat on a couch and talked about her new book. She has written several, including a memoir, “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes,” from 2011, named for the Stephen Stills song about her. (A guitar that Stills gave her in 1968 was propped against a wall.) The new book is a collection of poetry. “I have always tried to write poetry because I can try to turn it into songs,” Collins said. “In 2016, I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to write ninety poems in ninety days.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you write three hundred and sixty-five poems for the year, and then you’ll have a whole book at the end?’ Well, he was right, and that book is ‘Sometimes It’s Heaven.’ ”“I got hooked with songwriting because Leonard Cohen said to me, in 1966, ‘I don’t know why you’re not writing songs,’ ” she continued. “So I went home, and I wrote a song called ‘Since You’ve Asked.’ And it took me forty minutes. That’s how they hook you. And then the next song took about five years.” Collins and Cohen had a symbiotic artistic friendship. “Leonard Cohen was one of those rare people in the world who is actually grateful when you make him famous,” she said. They met through their mutual friend Mary Martin. (“Not the one who flies.”)“Maybe let’s get your misplaced car keys at the end.”Cartoon by Avi SteinbergCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copiedShopShop“All of Leonard’s friends, a lot of them women, were just wild about Leonard,” Collins said. “They thought he was the smartest person they’d ever known. Mary was working for Warner Bros., and also for Bob Dylan’s manager, and she and I and Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner used to hang out in the Village together. Mary would talk about Leonard in a kind of disgusted way—‘He’s so brilliant, and he’s really going nowhere.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And she said, ‘Because he writes these obscure poems.’ ” In 1966, Martin told Collins that Cohen wanted to meet her and play her his new songs. He came over, and, Collins recalled, “he said to me, ‘I can’t play the guitar, and I don’t know if this is a song, and I can’t sing.’ Then he played me ‘Suzanne.’ ” She told him that it was a song, and that she was recording it the next day. Her version was a hit. Later, she encouraged Cohen to sing, and he encouraged her to write.Collins’s husband, Louis Nelson, died suddenly, in December, of cancer; the Buddha in the helmet is for him. “I call him my Viking angel,” Collins said. “He designed the Korean War memorial on the Mall. He was a brilliant designer, a brilliant man, a great partner for forty-six years.” It was a season of striking loss. Within a few weeks, Collins also lost her brother, her friend Marshall Brickman, and her friend and fellow-folksinger Peter Yarrow. “It was like a mass exodus,” she said. “Here comes Gabriel with his horn! Get ready.” In 1992, she lost her son to suicide, and Joan Rivers, empathizing, called with advice: “She said, ‘I know that you’ll want
In March, Judy Collins, the ethereal, blue-eyed folksinging legend, will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday with a concert at Town Hall and the release of a book. “I tell people that I’m eighty-five and it’s the new twenty-seven,” Collins said on a recent morning. Her hair is now short and white, her vibe eternally beatific. She showed a visitor around her sunny, colorful, maximalist Upper West Side apartment, where she has lived for fifty-five years, full of evidence of a robust and Zelig-like life. In a hallway, a photograph of Collins on the set of “Sesame Street,” with the Muppets (“I sang an aria with Snuffleupagus”), and gold and platinum records, framed; in the dining room, an Al Hirschfeld portrait of Collins in “Peer Gynt” at the Delacorte, in 1969, wide-eyed and looming over Stacy Keach. “I played the long-suffering Solveig,” she said. “The songs were by John Morris, who wrote music for Mel Brooks movies, like ‘Blazing Saddles.’ ” A recent note from her friend Bill Clinton sat on a table; Collins performed at his inaugural gala in 1993. Once, while staying at the White House, Collins knocked her travel-coffee setup off the bathroom sink. “There I was in the middle of the night, cleaning up coffee grounds in the Lincoln Bedroom,” she said. “In the morning, they brought me the most wonderful coffee.”
She glided past a sculpture of the Buddha topped with a Viking helmet and proceeded into a splendiferous living room: a mint-green floral diptych, beautifully eerie Walton Ford bird paintings, plants and Tiffany lamps galore, couches piled with needlepoint pillows (“TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING IS WONDERFUL”). Two Persian cats exuded fluffy gravitas. “The white one is Tom Wolfe, and Rachmaninoff is hovering somewhere,” Collins said. She bent to stroke Tom Wolfe’s head, then sat on a couch and talked about her new book. She has written several, including a memoir, “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes,” from 2011, named for the Stephen Stills song about her. (A guitar that Stills gave her in 1968 was propped against a wall.) The new book is a collection of poetry. “I have always tried to write poetry because I can try to turn it into songs,” Collins said. “In 2016, I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to write ninety poems in ninety days.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you write three hundred and sixty-five poems for the year, and then you’ll have a whole book at the end?’ Well, he was right, and that book is ‘Sometimes It’s Heaven.’ ”
“I got hooked with songwriting because Leonard Cohen said to me, in 1966, ‘I don’t know why you’re not writing songs,’ ” she continued. “So I went home, and I wrote a song called ‘Since You’ve Asked.’ And it took me forty minutes. That’s how they hook you. And then the next song took about five years.” Collins and Cohen had a symbiotic artistic friendship. “Leonard Cohen was one of those rare people in the world who is actually grateful when you make him famous,” she said. They met through their mutual friend Mary Martin. (“Not the one who flies.”)
“All of Leonard’s friends, a lot of them women, were just wild about Leonard,” Collins said. “They thought he was the smartest person they’d ever known. Mary was working for Warner Bros., and also for Bob Dylan’s manager, and she and I and Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner used to hang out in the Village together. Mary would talk about Leonard in a kind of disgusted way—‘He’s so brilliant, and he’s really going nowhere.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And she said, ‘Because he writes these obscure poems.’ ” In 1966, Martin told Collins that Cohen wanted to meet her and play her his new songs. He came over, and, Collins recalled, “he said to me, ‘I can’t play the guitar, and I don’t know if this is a song, and I can’t sing.’ Then he played me ‘Suzanne.’ ” She told him that it was a song, and that she was recording it the next day. Her version was a hit. Later, she encouraged Cohen to sing, and he encouraged her to write.
Collins’s husband, Louis Nelson, died suddenly, in December, of cancer; the Buddha in the helmet is for him. “I call him my Viking angel,” Collins said. “He designed the Korean War memorial on the Mall. He was a brilliant designer, a brilliant man, a great partner for forty-six years.” It was a season of striking loss. Within a few weeks, Collins also lost her brother, her friend Marshall Brickman, and her friend and fellow-folksinger Peter Yarrow. “It was like a mass exodus,” she said. “Here comes Gabriel with his horn! Get ready.” In 1992, she lost her son to suicide, and Joan Rivers, empathizing, called with advice: “She said, ‘I know that you’ll want to cancel everything, and you can’t do that, because if you cancel you’re not going to get over this.’ ” A few days later, Collins played a show in Palm Springs. “It absolutely works,” she said. “You have to be focussed. You have to be present. The work is healing, and being at a certain place at a certain time.”
Collins seems youthful, despite everything. “As long as I can keep my bones,” she said. “I gave up skiing, which I hate, but I can’t afford a fall.” What about cross-country skiing? “No! I like the thrill of the snowstorm and all the pine trees being filled with snow and me in the middle of it all, just racing down a hill. That’s what I want. I don’t want the other stuff.”♦
