My picks of his poetry books: Spice Box of Earth, and Energy of Slaves
www.philipquinn.ca
"Writer "
Leonard Cohen
I’m tempted to resort to Northrop Frye’s idea that it all starts with The Bible but already I hear the objections so why not The Koran or The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Instead, I turn to a simple sentence I found in Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers:
O Reader do you know that a man is writing this?
When I came across this, I was in the midst of completing an undergrad degree in English Literature. The dead or the soon-to-be-dead produced literature and it consisted of an evolutionary series of movements, the Romantics marching behind Augustan poets such as Alexander Pope.
Cohen put me back into my skin, that writers even the long dead such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake belched, suffered headaches and worried about paying the rent. Paradoxically, I found in his book first published in 1966, a summation to date, of the territory the novel and even poetry had travelled.
Beautiful Losers with a combination of modern juxtaposition and a kind of surrealism strangely enough had a lyricism that was as beautiful as anything the romantics ever produced, but also had reference to comic books, the movies, and like W.S. Burroughs and even James Joyce, a healthy disregard for traditional narrative, the ‘he said, she said’ kind of exposition that still very much dominates the literary mainstream.
