Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
The next book on my poetry shelf is Me and the Dead
Katy Evans-Bush is an American poet, living in England, and she runs the wonderful blog Baroque in Hackney. If you haven’t read her, I highly recommend checking out her site. She’s a beautiful writer. This collection was published a couple of years ago, and she decided to do an online book-review tour, reaching out to bloggers she knew and liked to read the collection and review it. I was fortunate enough to be one of those people, but unfortunately it was late in the year of 2008, a terrible time for me and my family and I was unable to participate. I explained the situation to her, and she was sympathetic and understanding. I kept telling myself I would get to it, but 2009 was a cataclysm of terrible events, and I lost the ability to read at all for about 5 months. These are excuses, and I know they are valid ones – we do what we are able to do in life, we have to cut ourselves slack when things get that bad – but I do have residual guilt at not following through on what I said I would do. I did read the collection, eventually, and it’s fantastic, and it is my great pleasure now to be able to write about it. Poetry lovers, this is a collection you won’t want to miss.
Her experience of life flows into her verse. She really knows her stuff. This is one of those instances where a voice is so distinct, so singular, that you could not mistake it for anyone else’s. As an American who has lived in England since she was 19 years old, there’s a trans-Atlantic feel to the collection. She works with that confluence, admitting it and incorporating it. She said in an interview:
The UK “voice” is much more wry, ironic, mocking or self-mocking. There’s more use of humour. Wit, word play, punning (even the serious papers here have punning headlines as the standard), double entendre – and there is much more metrical rhyming poetry from people who don’t consider themselves “formalists.” The political divide between “free verse” and “formalist poetry” doesn’t exist in the UK. (I think it is a political, not an aesthetic, one; and it’s exacerbated now by the fact that a lot of poets write free verse because it’s all they know how to do.) Glyn Maxwell is an example of an English poet who writes in form, who isn’t a “formalist” poet in the political sense, who has crossed over (as it were) to the USA. Most poets here use rhyme, sometimes, and metre, sometimes, and think nothing of it.
There is a sort of earnestness in the US which does spill, to ill effect, I think, into poetry. It doesn’t do in the UK ever to look as if you care too much about something. But then, the UK can suffer from a surfeit of politeness and anecdotalism. You want sweep, too, and America certainly has that.
I love the multiplicity of experience and the opening-out of the more pronounced Modernist influence. I love DA Powell, and Frederick Seidel, for example. As different as they are; they both use words and cadences in really invigorating ways.
My favourite poets come from both sides of the Atlantic; I think either without the other would be much the poorer.
Her poems have sweep. She reminds me a lot of Paul Muldoon. Her references are wide and fearless. There is a moose strolling into Northern Exposure in one poem, for example, but then other poems talk of love and loss and sex and nights in pubs. There are ghosts here, a sense of all who have come before – not only other poets, but ancestors and dead love affairs that still haunt the landscape. One of my favorites in the collection is a poem called “The Dinosaur Opera”. Here’s a wonderful interview with Evans-Bush by poet Ernie Hilbert, where they talk extensively about the technical aspects of her poetry, and “The Dinosaur Opera” in particular. She says:
When I wrote the poem I was just trying to imagine dinosaurs having operas. It never even occurred to me to imagine them having a different kind; I just thought they’d be doing La Boheme or something. I love the T Rex too.
But as so often happens, when you write one thing you are also, on a deeper level, writing something you aren’t even aware of at the time. I do think this is a serious poem. People very rarely spot the small detail of the electric cars. I suppose it’s about how in life there is no rehearsal, it’s about beauty and poignancy and death I suppose if you think about it. I came out of it really loving those brave little dinosaurs.
And yes, I did deliberately make T Rex’s waistcoat damask: I wanted the comic contrast. I did want him to be a bit camp. Opera is deliciously un-dinosaur. I guess in one way it is a dinosaur . . . and like the dinosaurs maybe it will go extinct—but, as with them, it will be a shame.
Beautiful. Her work always has that mix of wit and grief in it. I love a poet who can imagine her way into a situation, or an image, and can make me see it as well. The dinosaur opera is a perfect example. Once you have imagined it, at Evans-Bush’s insistence, you can’t stop thinking about it. I love how she really works with her influences. She is like Ezra Pound in that way, who hashed out his feelings for other poets in poem after poem. She references them, she works with them, she talks to them, the boundaries between Then and Now completely blurred, as they usually are with such influences.
The poem I will excerpt today is along those lines. It is addressed to John Keats. It is yet another example of how she can make me see, she can make me think. I had never thought of his death mask before. The detail of the “turban” is an instance of an image so specific, so right, that an entire situation springs to life in the reader’s mind. It has that wonderful mix of surprise and inevitability that the best images always have. I read such an image and think, “A-ha! Fascinating! Never thought of that before!”, while simultaneously thinking, “Of course. That is perfect. Of course that is how it was.”
I do not know how she does it, but I can say that I am very glad she has.
Notice how she addresses him directly, in the first line. She is on a first-name basis with him. This is how intimate she is with her influences. He is dead, but not dead. His death mask is a “life mask”.
Me and the Dead is an emotional and intelligent collection, and makes me want to read more and more of this woman’s work. And be sure and check out her amazing blog. It’s RICH!
The Life Mask
Keats, 1816
They think you were dead, John! But you were just patiently waiting
— facemasked in plaster — with eyes closed, for someone to tap it
and cheerfully tell you that’s it! You can get up and talk now!
Your jaw’s clenched to stop you from laughing, or letting ideas
become exclamation – it’s all in your temples, the effort,
and also a certain excitement – while Haydon, your sculptor,
admonishes you to keep still or you’ll die without cracking
that old childhood mystery: how do I look with my eyes shut?
The turban he’s wrapped round your hairline, to keep it from pulling –
he’d never have done that if this were a death mask, no need to.
And your eyes, even shut in cold plaster, are so nearly twitching
you no more look dead than the way people look when they’re hiding,
peeking behind their hands, counting out – ready or nothing –
and someone hears breathing and opens the curtains, and finds them.
