Marginalized German Female Romantic Poet looks for Like-minded Goth

When the literati gather to discuss the canon, particularly the poetic canon, they often overlook historical and literary realities that help create that canon. I have here, particularly, misogyny in mind and the correlated pedestals and gutters into which women in poems, and of poetry, are symmetrically cast. On pedestals or in gutters, the work of female poets is easily ignored.

Such is the historical predicament of German female romantic poet Kattan Mous. For too many years now, Kattan has lingered in the shadow of her brother Anony, who is represented in poetry collections across all genres. Little is known of Anony Mous, and even less is known about his sister Kattan.

This is unfair, for Kattan was a genre-bender from the outset – in many ways defined the future of women in poetry. The first female poet to affect clothing in all-black, she also took her coffee and lovers in that fashion. A pioneer in the field of mascara-application. gaol-house tattoos, Gaulousies, and misery, she is perhaps best know in literature for her only written work, a seething poetic contemplation on mortality and dirt (We are told it is incomparable in the original German).

A DAY AT THE BEACH
Kattan Mous

I looked into a grain of sand,
And saw the earth, an orb
And lands
In a great universe absorb
and expand!
To include perhaps, even more lands
And lands and lands, and lands again!
And when I look, more lands within!

A solitary walker, me!
I swooned, I me, I reveried!
The lands include and bound the seas,
Beneath all of which, I understand
There lies more land,
And land, and land!

And each land promising only bliss.
Not sculptured garden or Arcadian myth
And then, at last I understand
We come from land
To go to land.

Can a little sister get a hand?
(REPEAT CHORUS IF YOU'VE GOT ONE)

Unfortunately (from a critical perspective premised on the unimpeded gaze of male hegemony) Kattan was not suicidal, lesbian, or cruelly beautiful. Lacking any of these key ingredients to a place in the pantheon, she was forgotten after her untimely death, age 93, at the hands of a mercury-based black nail-polish.

We are asked, "who did she influence?" and the tragic answer is no one. Consigned to the trashbin of literary history by the withering male gaze, she disappeared upon death, if not earlier. With this essay I hope to move Kattan from disfigurement to transfigurement - to find Kattan a place in the new canon, the canon of "forgotten" poets - poets with asyncopated rhythms, poets who deftly rhyme "moon" and "june," poets without love except from those whose fetish is to love the unloved (Kattan is rumoured to have dated Wordsworth), poets without the skills to pay the bills,

Kattan Mous, We barely knew ye!