Posts Tagged
katy evans-bush

Polyphonic Can-Can

Katy Evans-Bush has that remarkable quality of making me want to read poetry for fun. So much so that I’ve refused a review copy of her book Me and the Dead, offered for kicking off this Cyclone virtual book tour, and I’m going to go and spend real money on it instead. It will be the second poetry book I’ve bought since I got a volume of Robert Crawford’s stuff for a friend back in 2003.

I have, though, read Katy’s free sampler on her publisher’s website. It’s cracking. And it has a damned fine photo on the front.

Oddly, what I like so much about Katy’s poems is the fact that they reveal a fine prose writer. Take this, the first stanza of her poem ‘The Bog of Despair’:

We’d lunched on Greek salad and coffee
in a place with white walls and a skylight,
and when the guy in the corner’s phone
went off in a polyphonic can-can
we laughed without even trying to hide it.

Run the lines together, tidy up the punctuation and – bingo – you’ve got a slice of musical prose. Delicious.

Anyway, I caught up with Katy by email and asked her about her dreams, and what she thinks about some of mine.

When did you start writing poetry, and why?
My relationship with poetry started as soon as I could read… no, in fact everyone’s relationship with it starts even earlier, with the beginnings of speech – with nursery rhymes and songs. My grandfather used to sing me the old vaudeville song, “K-K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore…” and it’s still imprinted in my head. And I still think “Row, row, Row Your Boat” is amazingly mysterious: that creepy use of the word “merrily,” and “gently” down the stream – the stream of life, which is “but a dream.”

Children love play with words and sounds, and meaning is fluid to them. They love different ways of understanding things – it’s how they learn. They don’t have an innate sense of poetry being dull or boring – they get taught that.

I never really differentiated poetry from other forms of books, stories, songs, etc. I was lucky; my parents and even their friends gave me poetry books, along with fairy tales, which I’m also steeped in. I still have my Selected Poems for Young People by Edna St Vincent Millay – a selection, not specially written for children. I can remember reading it at about 7 or 8. And I was unafraid of the Oxford Book of English Verse; I’d just dip in and read whatever took my fancy.

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Posted by: Ben Locker
Published: 8th December, 2008 at 12:01 am in Blog, The North Meadow Interview.
Tags: katy evans-bush, me and the dead, poetry, salt publishing
Comments: 7 Comments »