'[REVIEW] The Beautiful Losses: Allegorical Prosody, Historical (Dis)Continuity, and the Long Shadow of Leonard Cohen', by D.M. Rice

"Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread and of endless length, a thread that is the same color as the night. Out, out along the narrow highway sails my mind, driven by curiosity, luminous with acceptance, far and out[...]. [...] All the disparities of the world, the different wings of the paradox, coin-faces of problem, petal-pulling questions, scissors-shaped conscience, all the polarities, things and their images and things which cast no shadow, and just the everyday explosions on a street, this face and that, a house and a toothache, explosions which merely have different letters in their names, my needle pierces it all, and I myself, my greedy fantasies, everything which has existed and does exist, we are part of a necklace of incomparable beauty and unmeaning."
-Leonard Cohen, The Beautiful Losers

Fred Pollack's collection The Beautiful Losses appears to have pretenses toward a near-universal scope. This is its ambition, to represent the exacting precarity and simultaneously overwrought decadence of life in the contemporary world: class inequality, privilege, and the primacy of material power over ideological quibbles. To these ends, Pollack makes a strong argument, without having to rely on didactic absolutism, or only doing so with an apparent wink and a nudge. As I have suggested elsewhere, now in the deeper recesses of the postmodern era, as a result of both technology and developed specialisations of interest, a greater historical scope is available for our seemingly "modern" confusions, and this phenomena is represented through the presentation of the billionaire class alongside kings, who are equated with presidents, who are shown, despite the apparent evidence to the contrary, to reflect, to whatever extent, the hierarchical tendencies of the artist, or poet, whose status, in the greater historical context, is, rather, immaterial in nature. The lion's share of the writing in this collection reads, to me, like vignettes of contemporary life, occasionally obfuscated with anachronistic language games, but with a clear scope on the sense of restlessness which defines the present moment. That said, Pollack's writing is learnéd but not pretentious, self-aware without being trivializing or neurotic. It is clearly the result of a long-sought mastery, and, to those ends, achieves a sort of stylistic unity. But my pathway into this text was not a straight line, and I aim, in this review, to recount the sidewise journey from access to introspection, and place the collection in the context of my own reading, with special attention paid to questions of lineage, or lack thereof, narrative style, and the (unconscious, if what I've been informed of is the truth) legacy of L. Cohen's own Beautiful Losers on this writing project.
From the first I imagined The Beautiful Losses as a sort of spiritual successor to Beautiful Losers, which is a widely praised novel by one of America's (Canada's) greatest poets. Seeing the title of Pollack's work gave me the opportunity to dig into this supposed magnum opus, and decide for myself on the matter. Having read both, the connection, however opaque, is substantial and warrants discussion. Cohen's novel follows a down-and-out bohemian who is picking up the pieces after the suicide of his young wife, Edith, and best friend/sexual play-partner, F.. The protagonist is an academic, whose life work involves excavating the story of one Katherine Tekawitha from obscurity, and describing his (displaced) longing for this historical figure: describing her miracles and making a 'saint' of her, recounting her fraught upbringing and the sexual trauma which precedes her utter religious devotion, and generally humanising the native American experience of colonisation. Without getting lost in the uproarious details, it is a brash, evocative novel whose erotic orientation is, to say the least, quite shocking, and which represents a sort of 'loosened' moral center in terms of sexuality, drug use, and political dynamics. In the background of the later text, F. is placed in an asylum for an attempted bombing of a statue of Queen Victoria, and the lines of reality begin to blur. The narrator is shown as having the same damaged hand as his friend and sexual confidant, and the question of whether the narrator even exists as their own person is quite deftly brought to the fore. These cultural tension points, and the narrative slipperiness, seem to be quite in keeping with the project Pollack aspires toward in The Beautiful Losses––no less than the emphasis on bringing together these superficially disparate poles of beauty and loss ("parting is such sweet sorrow"). But when I bring this matter up to the poet (who I have been in correspondence with for years now, and who has published much work on Sybil), his answer provides another surprise: "I wondered if the phrase “Beautiful Losers” was a pun on TBL, but it sounded familiar and I googled it. The Leonard Cohen book and the film have, as far as I can see, nothing whatever to do with my work. Of course it’s your review and I’m very grateful for it. But please, please, Derrick, remember that postmodernist hijinks – farfetched associations, Derridean punning etc. – as well as most of “popular culture” are alien to me." 
Of course, this answer was less than satisfying. It was not only the L. Cohen book, but the more obscure album by Simon Joyner (more explicitly a reference to the former), which were brought to mind here, and I considered this a very generative thread of analysis. So, what now? My inkling that perhaps "the lady doth protest too much" was buttressed by the very real overlap which I saw within the texts themselves. Pollack is not aloof to the notion of taboo as poetic fodder: take the poem "No Problem," where Sophocles is evoked ("Call no man lucky till he has passed the borders of this life secure from pain") in a manner which coincides with one of the character's apparent suicidal ideation. Here is the bringing of a classical brand of cynicism with something more contemporary. It is not a far walk from Cohen's marrying of contemporary ugliness with the more ancient and colonial struggles (frequent use of latin and french are sprinkled through Beautiful Losers, as if to substantiate the grotesqueness of the narrator's life by contrast). There even appears to be an acute awareness of the stakes in popular culture here: what with the narrative of billionaires jetting off into space instead of dealing with the lived realities of climate change, systemic poverty, racial inequality, etc. There are many such moments, real or projected, that come to the fore throughout the collection. Cohen's protagonist is also living in two contrasting historical moments, not easily reconciled, and yet which do not necessarily preclude each other. There is something uncanny in the move, and, well, my neo-Freudian tendencies seem to insist that even the sense of this text "sounding familiar" (indeed, taking up so much space in a certain left of center cultural framing that it would be hard to avoid) is sufficient evidence to advance the argument, in theory. The connective tissue between these supposedly disparate moments, in my own critical rendering, is furthered if one were to read the epigraph of this review alongside two poems in particular, "Gate of Horn" and "Proof of Concept."
My interest in Beautiful Losers was to see if there was, perhaps, some thread of influence which permeated from one text to the other. One such moment of influence which I had recently discovered was found in Emily Wilson's exceptional rendering of The Odyssey, where Odysseus covers his genitals with a "leafy branch," which seems to resemble the opening scene in Genesis (Book 6, lines 127-9). This is a phenomena which I have termed "historical continuity," the advancement or appropriation of literary material into new forms. Whether this is to better meet the moment, or if the process is unconscious (collectively unconscious, to use the Jungian term) is scarcely relevant, such symbolic and semantic lineages abound in the history of literary writing, and offer insights into the aspirations and assumptions of the 'poetic' character. My desire is to bring to light the connection between ancient scribes who dictate in the Satire of the Trades, "the day in school will profit you. Its works [that is, written works] are forever" to the early modern pseudo-beatific notion of eternal preservation through poetic mastery. I myself aspire to continue this literary lineage, and to draw the lines of influence for the sake of future writers, if not living ones. One such moment, then, appears with an uncanny parallel in Pollacks's "Gate of Horn:" "my best ideas come from the edge of sleep, where financial projections are doubted, the medical question tabled, the report on means and ends returned for editing." This is easily compared to Cohen's line: "sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread and of endless length." Like Pollack, Cohen seems to want to stuff the entire universe inside of his project, without forsaking the uniqueness of the American (Canadian) experience, here illustrated with a reference to Emerson's On Experience, "a necklace of incomparable beauty and unmeaning." Pollack's sensitivity is to "where a corrupt yet timid republic yields with a sigh to a king" which materially dominate "world-overthrowing, anarcho-critical ideas that are entirely suppressed or, if not, sent back for peer review" before they are doomed to the 'loss' that obscurity entails. This is not altogether different from the political radicalism of Cohen's text, which reads as fresh now as it did then, despite the span of years, as a matter of narrative, cultural, or historical continuity. 
Another slippery, and no less easily resolved point of comparison can be found in the question of narrative orientation and authorial self-representation or lack thereof. Pollack addresses this at several points in this manuscript, but none so explicitly as in the poem "Proof of Concept," where he writes "He was sick of their attributing incidents and 'feelings' in his poems to 'you,' i.e., him." A seemingly dialectical sense of this matter of representation begins to burgeon when he describes including famous authors in his works "so they would admire him and he could fulfill Auden’s line: 'he became his admirers.'" Of course, at face value this is not in contradiction of the 'not-self' represented in his poem, no more than his observation "Don’t go — you’re me too" in the same poem. But, digging a little deeper, it is clear that to make a self of the other (something of a Lacanain/Kleinian gesture, but no need to elaborate at present) is to acknowledge that something of the self inevitably lingers even when discussing other persons or perspectives, which is hardly a controversial statement. To those ends, for every poem like "No Problem" or "Baron's Blues" there is one which reads as an explicit slice of the author's own life. In "The Perks" Pollack seems to self-represent the experience of an older writer (who also happens to be, or have recently been, a professor of the subject) with no insecurity: "now I relate to much younger people, young enough to value “experience,” and see me as one, and surreptitiously seek wisdom." The gesture of their "[dropping] a quarter in [his] cup" is insufficient to take the audience out of the very tangible sense that this poem is essentially autobiographical, even with its conceptual wrinkles regarding non-representation ("the earth, leached of metaphor...represents all the crap that didn’t happen") and allegory ("speak in parables") (again, more on the latter point later). I find myself thinking of the historical dialectic of self-representation to be found between two of the most-celebrated Western poets, Dante and Milton. The former creates writing so intensely personal and self-confessional, yet situates himself (in The Devine Comedy, at least) within a fantastical setting which disrupts an explicitly straight-forward reading of the text as reality. Although the text represents reality, it is not beholden to it at all, and while the self of Dante at times comes across as a caricature, at times, readers cannot help the sense but to imagine the text and its protagonist as the author himself (despite any intellectual pretensions to the contrary which discourage us from equating 'poet' with 'speaker'). Milton, on the other hand, is as hands off as it is possible to be, removed and unsituated within his own texts, at first glance. The characters and settings seem to take on a life of their own, such that Blake famously dictates that Milton was "of the Devil’s party without knowing it" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. While contemporary readers may obliquely project some personality to the author (perhaps it was his anti-royalist tendencies which buttress the anti-authoritarian representations with greater poetic strength, rather than a lack of religiosity), this task can only be achieved through squinting eyes, with no sure conclusions for any but the most specialised readers (myself decidedly not included among them). Pollack seems to have it both ways, and, to use Cohen's term, flies with "the different wings of the paradox, coin-faces of [the] problem" without stopping to ask whether his form or figure are suited for the venture. This is the greatest strength of the collection, and, to the same ends, what most gives me pause in attempting to place it in any critical capacity.
I should probably not have been shocked at Pollack's resistance to "farfetched associations, Derridean punning etc," but it was not a generative point of departure, for me. As with the students in "The Perks," in another life I could imagine Fred as a mentor to myself, guiding me to greater professional and personal accomplishments. But our dynamic is not aligned for those ends, with me in position of editor publishing his poems (and, hopefully soon, a greater collection of his earlier works), and him in the position of late-in-life author making a success of so much loss (occasionally alluded to in our discussions in both substantive and everyday terms, petty illness or dead relatives, years spent trying to get it together before achieving the status and position he now holds). In our correspondence, he points to another review of the text, saying that its author had misread several of his poems, though he was still quite happy to be reviewed at all. I want to find the space to say that perhaps there is only misreading, which feels like a Derridarean gesture (although not explicitly deconstructionist, in its original meaning). I am in fact pleased in my own way to be the recipient of this comparison, even if it's in a slightly derisive context, and believe strongly, intuitively, that my orientation is, in fact, a byproduct of Derrida, whose writing I greatly admire. My senes of this reading for lineage, for association and the bringing together of works which occupy similar cultural spaces, despite any apparent (or only apparent) connections seems like a worthy critical task to which I am decidedly qualified. Reading this text in isolation is of almost no interest to me. I would much rather delve into the notion of historical continuity, which I have tried to manifest using other terminology at various points: narrative "rhyming," developmental appropriation, even the more common "allusion," which does not quite reach the point which I'm trying to make. Ultimately, I wonder if we can see every work of art as the "thing in itself," and if that is the beauty of it––an essential argument, or lens through which human experience can be understood, if not the "human condition" in the broader, now-antiquated sense. "The Beautiful Losses" as a statement in itself, seems quite informative on the matter of what is required for a life to be understood poetically. I wonder, then, how to make sense of my own recent collection in this regard, Moby Pussy, and if, following Melville's own Great Work, there isn't something there about the absolute removal and saturation of meaning in the pursuit of, well, anything, as a thing in itself––the word pussy reorients this thought in more specific terms of gender and sexuality, brings it to the contemporary moment, so to speak, but the absurd gesture of the original text, surely, remains as steadfast as ever.
But I am beginning to lose the thread of my argument, and mean only to illustrate the point that an author is not always the sole authority about their own text. The most famous example of this that comes to mind is Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, whose popular interpretation he resisted in an act of utter futility. Although it may be solipsistic, interpretations of literary texts are, if not like snowflakes, possibly akin to fingerprints, where similar and opposing patterns may appear naturally, on account of chance and probability, rather than intention and curation. I am reminded of the once-essential essay Laocoon, which argues that polyvalence is the foremost feature of poetry, and, despite pretenses to the contrary, language in general. The apotheosis of poetic work, in this framing (which, for my own biases, I am quite partial to), is that which invites, rather than shuns, a multiplicity of interpretation. Counter-examples abound––at present I am inclined to call attention to the great dystopian novels of the twentieth century, which seem quite explicitly coherent and even didactic in their orientation toward life and the art object, yet isn't poetry another matter altogether? Pollack's writing is, in this framework, a paradox, which does not easily yield itself to inclusion in one camp or another. On the one hand, Pollack appears as a formalist (that is, relying on tangible and material associations to develop his poetic work) who resists didactic clarity (although not quite an imagist in the sense Pound meant it, a reference to the poet in "The Draw" goes not unnoticed). On the other, his supposed debt to the beats (Pollack himself being the so-called  'beat-classicist' which first stimulated our correspondence, Ginsberg and Kerouac among the writers referenced in the aforementioned poem) belies the seemingly straight-forward quality of his poetic technique. This is a sticking point for me as a reader, and I have portrayed the quotations from Pollack's text as prose rather than 'breaking' lines because his writing appears most often like prose, rather than anything else. At times this prose takes on an allegorical quality, like in the title-piece, "The Beautiful Losses," with its brilliant blend of historical anachronism and contemporary political subtext, but it rarely seems to break the mold of language in the sense described in "Laocoon." In fact, the most substantive argument for calling much of the work poetry at all, and not "flash fiction" in the form of "prose poetry" or some such variation, seems to come to me from a Derridarian lineage, which the author himself resists. There is much use in allegory, and I am partial to it as a medium, and I have used the term "prosody" rather than "prosaic" in my title for two reasons. One, the latter has associations of dullness (not to say that there isn't a subdued quality which is the product of Pollack's confidence as a writer) which is not my intention at all. But more importantly, such a text should, if it is to be read and defined as poetry, expand, rather than delimit, a reader's understanding of what poetry is and can be in the context of contemporary literature. Within my own project of postmodern classicism, The Beautiful Losses is a welcome text which displays the potential strengths of the genre, although it is nearly impossible for me to extricate these qualities from what I like about Beautiful Losers.
What is the role of criticism, anyways? Although I am not here to sell books, it would not be amiss if someone read my review and decided to buy a copy of Pollack's collection to decide things out for themselves. In my forgetfulness, I have almost neglected to offer an alternative standard for poetry, one which comes from Pollack's own poem, "I Used to Tell My Students," published in Mudlark and left here in its entirety:

The trick is not to write a line
before you know the last. 
Which you then repeat, over and over
to yourself, with glee, as your reader will,
in shock. A poem resembles
a flower. It lets in admiration, and
analysis from those capable; provides
sweet smells and enticing colors as
it shuts.

Pollack's reading of this poem alone is enough to draw comparison to some great names in American poetry: John Ashberry, Al Purdy, Robert Lowell. Neither allegory nor quite ambiguous, this poem offers an alternative lens through which the collection might be read and understood. At its heights, Pollack accomplishes according to his own standard in spades, although it is not always the case. For my part, I am still introspecting about the role of the critic for contemporary and future writers and readers. It does not seem to be a misplaced assumption that the role could be to place texts within a coherent lineage of shared symbols, narrative manoeuvers, and thematic content. Less ambitiously, it would not be amiss for criticism to simply be an account of authentic reading experience, even if (especially if!) that is at odds with the project of the author themselves. In this instance, it seems that despite Pollack's hesitance there is a comparison to be made between his book and Cohen's book of a similar title. Whether this was intentional or not scarcely matters, and the long shadow of Cohen's influence should be welcomed as a guest in the idealistic world of the Greek epic, for what new insights it may provide. Like poetry itself, the matter of criticism seems less about discerning the "good" and "bad" (which, to be fair, is the colloquial sense of 'critic'), than about generating uncertainties which are (in a proto-Nietzschean sense) themselves the measure and function of poetry.