Steven Lovatt reviews Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle by Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions, 2024)
An old chestnut: can physical hardship and mental pressure, homelessness, persecution and sickness be a compost for great poetry? Or is this just a wicked Romantic lie, a lie because it is only talent – not oppression and difficulty – that makes great poetry; and wicked, because what is bad for human beings cannot be good for poetry and because behind every celebrated poet of adversity, there are many more who were crushed by it and whose talent was never allowed to develop.
By her own account, in 2021 and 2022 Katy Evans-Bush was physically and mentally depleted by the loss of her health, her home, and (almost) of her hope for a world brought to the brink of ruin by the old men who rule it – “you don’t know who you are but everybody else does”. She had no resilience left, she says, and couldn’t write. At a personal low she rediscovered the poetry of the American counterculture writer Kenneth Patchen, who worked through lifelong pain and disillusionment to produce a humane, socially engaged poetry of buoyancy, clarity and hope. Rereading Patchen gave Evans-Bush a foothold, and the poems collected in Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle are its bracing achievement. Many of them are explicitly political in their disgust at the Johnson and Sunak administrations, the enervating legacy of Tory ‘austerity’ and the global neoliberal stitch-up. The poems’ resistance manifests in their intelligence and flair. Rising above the apathy, ennui and fatigue consequent on forty years of reducing people to economic units, and societies to markets, the collection is an outcropping of defiance, and an assertion of the human spirit. It is work that will make you angry, make you laugh and make you think. It is also a dependable source of good counsel (in ‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #49’: “10 Beware suburban arseholes dressed as shamans”).
I said that Evans-Bush reread Patchen, but it got messier than that. She took scissors to an edition of his Collected, selecting phrases “very fast, like tarot cards, but face up – and laid them on [her] desk as stepping stones across the various enormities”. The connection that ensued, between Patchen’s words and those of Evans-Bush, is dramatised in ‘Lines from Kenneth Patchen #29’:
[…] Come on, Mister –
help a girl out of a jam. I’m using your poems,
if you don’t mind, like a phone. Hold the string taut.
You’re doing the talking. I’m taking notes.
Then I’m doing the talking and you took the notes.
Though this collection is too outward-looking and too rooted in the context of Covid-and Tory-plagued Britain to be in the conventional sense a ‘dialogue’, the two-way nature of the relationship between Evans-Bush and Patchen is politically important. In asserting an affinity across time, it denies the willed ahistoricism of consumer capitalism and makes visible a beleaguered but living tradition of activism for social justice. Evans-Bush’s tone is also revealing: when she declares matter-of-factly “I’m doing the talking and you took the notes”, she’s meeting Patchen as a comrade and poetic equal.
It is work that will make you angry, make you laugh and make you think
Nevertheless, without Patchen’s example as someone who never stopped hoping nor writing, we infer that the ‘enormities’ might have been too much for Evans-Bush to contain, both as a person and as a poet. How, indeed, can poetry encompass a world changing so rapidly, and so rarely for the better? Your tenancy agreement is up for renewal (or not); you’re ill yet there’s no doctor to see you; your elected leaders agree with your dominant culture that your worth lies in your spending power alone and that you should fear incomers, strangers, the poor. Committed to resist all this, if you are not to fall silent and go under, then a good recourse is to avow the human need for connection in order that you can hold yourself and the world to account. Otherwise:
[…] We live scattered. Friends are everywhere:
under water, breathing smoke. We sit alone in our rooms.
Given how bleak a volume on these themes could be, it bears emphasising that Joe Hill is sheer pleasure to read right from the opening poem, ‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #1’:
You fake news, you fanatical suburbanite, you literalist,
you plodding proceduralist, you mildly racist structuralist, you
sexist whitist, you sexist even though you’re a woman. You
materialist monolectician, you define yourself by your car
while the seawater rises around us, you think ‘creativity’
is different from everything else, you buy coloured pens
to make mind maps of other people’s ideas.
The first virtue of this passage is how much energising, fuck-the-handbrake fun it is. In its torrential release, it’s one of several poems that seem to channel Patchen through Rosemary Tonks, but mostly it resembles a list of disses from a beef-settling rap lyric, the more effective for never quite erupting into oaths. It’s a full-bore demonstration of what Stevie Smith called “anger’s freeing power”, and I can’t agree with Fran Lock, in her otherwise excellent evaluation on the book jacket, that the poems here aren’t a catharsis. But if Lock was seeking to stress that these poems aim far beyond self-satisfaction, feeding from and giving back to that crucial something in us which is always larger than ourselves, then this is exactly right – Evans-Bush is always thinking beyond the ego, seeking connection, stressing common suffering and the need for a common (that is, a just) restitution. It has to be so, since (in ‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #19’): “When you shrink / we all lose strength, dear Country”.
The opening poem is also revealing in its targets. Evans-Bush’s loathing of conformism and selfishness is a given, but the attack on materialism and “monolecticians” is only the most explicit statement of something implied throughout the book – that she is ardent to defend and affirm spiritual values against “patriarchy plutocracy money & death”, and that the disentangling of hope from despair, in an era of moral confusion, requires dialectical thinking. And to an unusual degree, Evans-Bush’s poetic intelligence is, precisely, dialectical. Everything can be, should be, read two ways. What else are we to make of this odd little gnome, or Janus, from ‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #47’: “Nothing / has no meaning”, which depending on how you read the grammar could either be a stark statement about the bleak nature of “nothing” or a joyous recognition that meaning is everywhere (and is in fact both at the same time).
And to an unusual degree, Evans-Bush’s poetic intelligence is, precisely, dialectical. Everything can be, should be, read two ways
Not every poem is so breakneck. Evans-Bush is able to adapt her forms and voices, aligning them indivisibly with changes of pace and mood. In several poems I was struck by how a meditative or reflective tone is reinforced by a subtle patterning of soft, elongated sounds – ‘l’, ‘w’ and ‘y’ in particular – that occupy an ambiguous zone between consonants and vowels. The ‘l’ sound, in particular, when used repeatedly near the end of successive lines, helps to lace the stanza together, both by obliging a slower reading and, more mysteriously, by engendering a sensation of overlapping parallels. Overlapping parallels – there’s something poetry has over mathematics!
but I couldn’t stop thinking about how old
the world is, & how beautiful every particle,
even hidden somewhere in the evil,
& this led me far from where
I wanted to be.
I’m submitting this review the day before the British General Election, which will bring about a change of government, so belated and long desired. As Evans-Bush has it:
We’re counting to that day when we can watch it fall –
all of it, fall. Fall in a tottering sparkle
out in the street & on TV. We all need something
different to happen. Showers of light.
So tonight I’m here with the news on and it might
be something. This early day, because you can only
begin from where you are, is the day to drink the whisky
& let the police, yes, investigate the government.
For all the controlled fury and the bitter cataloguing of harms that Joe Hill contains, it is above all a hopeful book. It’s a beautifully written affirmation that we are not alone, that change is not only possible but inevitable, and that poetry still matters and can make a difference. The final words, appropriately, belong to both Evans-Bush and Patchen: “I say we must be green. Let it be showtime again.”
Steven Lovatt is an editor and tutor living in Swansea. He is a member of the International Literature Showcase, run by the British Council and the UK National Writing Centre, and his book Birdsong in a Time of Silence was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
