Katy Evans-Bush, Forgive the Language, Essays on Poets and Poetry (Penned in the Margins)Lively, direct and just enough 'out of the ordinary' without being too much so, Katy Evans-Bush has been a poet to admire for some time. This new book of essays and reviews thus looked worth having a look at and it is, being recognizably written in the same spirit as the poems, none too precious, rigorous but always on the approachable side of the purely academic.
In 1980, I proposed doing an undergraduate dissertation on Keats and Negative Capability but was told there wasn't 15000 words worth of things to say about it and so I did Marvell instead. Katy's essay here on the subject is about 3500-4000 words and she does a good job on it so I was probably well advised all those years ago. Negative capability was described by Keats in a letter in 1817, as,
when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
and has always looked like a good idea to me. The idea is explored and explained in terms of an escape from personality, 'less about already knowing the thing than it is about being open to the thing' and the process of writing poems which is one of asking rather than telling. It will be the essay to which I go whenever the question of negative capability comes up, which isn't every day, and I'm glad I never wrote about it because I would not have expressed it as well as this.
KEB is good at close reading but sometimes needs to be read quite closely herself. In Men's Troubles, she tells us that,
Frederick Seidel, in particular, might be seen as a 'man's poet': he is often charged with misogyny
and the circumstances of those charges are then clarified but one needs to read carefully to see where the association between being a 'man's poet' and misogyny has come from. I'm sure it's not implied that misogyny is an essential component of being a poet suitable for men. Ideally, if we are interested in the poetry then gender is not a primary concern but, by all means, for some it is a very significant issue but we don't want damning assumptions to creep in and be inappropriately applied to all men.
The Line is a comprehensive account of the line of poetry, the most crucial point about lines being where they end, whether on a rhyme or not, and thus the next begins. Like discussions of poetry in translation, there is a lot of very obvious stuff to be said and Katy goes from saying those to some profound observations that go beyond what would occur to many of us. If it seems alright, it probably is alright and we don't need to go any further than that but the best such writing, like Brodsky's or those books of close readings by Paul Muldoon or Tom Paulin, demonstrate to us why it looks alright or what is happening on deeper levels that are not revealed by less concentrated reading. Katy notices and thinks about detail and why it matters and how it works. It's like not just driving a car but knowing what is under the distributor cap.
By the Light of the Silvery Moon - Dowson, Schoenberg and the Birth of Modernism is an informed and compelling essay on fin de siecle aesthetics and those very exciting times. If it borrows some of its essential points from Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, it readily acknowledges where and when.
Dowson was even more the consummate Decadent than his friend Symons,
we are told, which means that,
Dowson was the symptom of the disease, of the reason Modernism had to happen.
which is 'in a nutshell', the story, and very much like why Pink Floyd meant the Sex Pistols had to happen, one is tempted to suggest.
It is impressive that alongside such a wide-ranging set of essays (more reviews, Ted Hughes, plagiarism, Dylan Thomas, London, Wallace Stevens), the author still has time to indulge an obsession with vintage typewriters, which are described with the attention to arcane features that only a genuine appreciator could know about. There is a lot to like and I wouldn't like it quite so much if I thought for one moment that I was being told things that I would agree with if I were in a position to have my own opinion. It is a hugely enjoyable book and I hope it reaches the wide audience it deserves.
