Poet, blogger, essayist and critic Katy Evans-Bush lets us sneak a peak into her world, literary and otherwise, in this richly illuminating interview.

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On poetry

How would you describe your work?

I think I might describe it as eclectic. My inspirations are from everywhere; I collect associations from all around the culture, not on purpose, but because it’s what I’m like; I reference fairy tales and movies, ghosts and feminism. I quote from all kinds of things. I like rhyme. I like jokes. I write clerihews (a very short humorous form that can be put to a darker use) – humour can be a very dark device! I like dream logic and try to find it wherever I can. 

Tell us about your new collection

Joe Hill Makes his Way into the Castle (CB Editions) is furiously political and angry, but also very personal — sort of ‘my life at the centre of the cyclone.’ It deals with grief and loss and displacement, but it’s also stuffed full of mordant jokes. 

“The function of poetry is the function of being human.”

What is poetry?

Ha! What indeed. The function of poetry is the function of being human. Of every civilisation we’ve uncovered, the earliest things we detect are not their governments or their money, it’s the things they made, and wrote. The writing itself comes later; earliest writings are so developed that they show us how poetry (along with music, to which it was probably originally recited) long preceded its means of preservation. Poetry isn’t ‘about’ rhyme or meter. Anglo-Saxon poetry used alliteration instead; that is, they matched up the beginnings of words instead of the ends. Some people define poetry as ‘patterned language’, but this is quite an open definition — there are lots of places besides rhyme or metre where patterning can happen. 

Does poetry have a function?

One of poetry’s main jobs as I see it is to be experimental. Christian Bök, the great Canadian experimentalist, once encoded a poem into a single-celled organism. As the organism changed, the poem changed: edited, as he says. Actually all the poets we remember were experimental. We remember them because they pushed things on, they tried doing something in a new way, and it worked. We only think they’re boring because so many people copied them. This is what Wordsworth meant when he said, ‘Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished’. 

So in the end, I think of poetry as the laboratory. The centrifuge. The test tube. It’s where we take the language to see how much pressure we can put it under: what new elements we can discover, what we can extract from it, or what new colours of smoke will come if we combine (or omit) things in new ways.

“A good poem is one whose author (consciously or not) approaches the language as their musical instrument, and cares about playing it well.”

What makes a ‘good’ poem?

A really satisfying poem, for me, operates on more than one level. It’s doing more than one thing at a time; preferably, more than about three things. A good poem is one whose author (consciously or not) approaches the language as their musical instrument, and cares about playing it well. A good poem isn’t the same as all the other poems you’ve read. I’m a bit suspicious of the merely anecdotal, and of poems that tell you what you’re supposed to think about them.

Do you have a favourite word or words?

No, I’m profligate. But I only love them in poems if they really are authentically the right word to be where they are. It’s an extraordinarily difficult art.

Is there a piece of advice that somebody has given you that has been particularly helpful? Do you have your own that you pass on?

General advice? Read! Write!

Life advice? Don’t be in a relationship with a man who doesn’t want you to write.

Poetry advice? Plenty.

I attended Maurice Riordan’s workshop at Morley College and he would stop you and bark: ‘Editorial!’ He taught me to spot where I’d started — even for half a line — telling people what to think, or what I thought. While I was editing Salt Publishing’s online mag, Horizon Review I saw so many poems do this. Brilliant, image-filled, even daring poems before the final stanza of death: the summing-up, the explanation of what it had all been about. Trust the poem! 

Don’t be afraid of simplicity. Or complication if it’s fruitful.

Don’t be pretentious. Make sure your images all speak to each other — or else don’t speak to each other — in a productive way. Be careful of words that can be several different parts of speech; they can muddy the sense. ‘The natural object is always the adequate symbol’. Find the vocabulary that’s authentically yours. Don’t be afraid of simplicity. Or complication if it’s fruitful. And humour can be deadly serious. Have fun!

Is there a difference between Poetry and Spoken Word? Does it matter?

The difference is that, as with poems and song lyrics, page and stage are different art forms. A poem on the page has to be the performance as well as the script; it can’t rely on your expressive body language or your ringing way of saying a certain line. That’s the difference. Written language is musical notation.

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On writing

How did you come to writing?

I wrote my first recorded story at four years old, dictating it to my mother as she sat at her Royal typewriter. I realised very early on that reading was the receiving end of a conversation, and this gave me a sense of responsibility to add to that conversation. Writing is all I’ve ever really wanted to do, even though I’ve had several long and terrible periods of not writing.

I’m very political by nature. I can’t help it: everything is political.

Are there themes that you return to?

I’m very political by nature. I can’t help it: everything is political. My blog, Baroque in Hackney, which ran for about 13 years — pretty much the first serious UK poetry blog — was shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for political writing. I return a lot to the past, and how we’re still in it. The title poem of my first collection, Me and the Dead, is about how we live in other people’s houses; they built them, they spent whole lifetimes in them. I note there’s a poem in the new book on this theme, but with a different slant.

Do you write in other genres?

I write prose nonfiction as well as poetry. I’ve reviewed books in Magma and Poetry London and had a long-running column in MsLexia on blogging, self-publishing and building an audience. I’ve also written essays and cultural commentary in various places. In 2015 my book, Forgive the Language: Essays on Poetry and Poets came out with Penned in the Margins. I have a Substack, called A Room of Someone Else’s, which I’m always saying I’m going to breathe into life properly, like another Baroque in Hackney.

I’m the perfect autodidact: insatiably interested in just about everything, with an instinctive memory for poetry (though little else) and a huge work ethic but no discipline whatsoever.

Have you had to overcome any barriers to write?

Broadly? Men! In all the ways you might care to mention. Also: myself. A late diagnosis with raging ADHD explains most of my difficulties, to be honest. 

And I arrived in the UK on my own steam, fresh from secondary school, without family or contacts except for an aunt who was very overworked and depressed and had few useful contacts of her own.

Aside from that, having come from the US so impecuniously — you’d never be allowed to do that now — I wasn’t eligible for a university grant, so I’ve had to figure out how to tame my brain on my own devices. I think I’m still the only serious poet I know who doesn’t have a BA, let alone the current de rigueur PhD. It makes getting work increasingly hard. But I would have struggled with the prescriptive and sustained work of a degree. I’m the perfect autodidact: insatiably interested in just about everything, with an instinctive memory for poetry (though little else) and a huge work ethic but no discipline whatsoever. I think things have changed for the current generation of young women poets, and we know a hell of a lot more about neurodiversity these days, but I guess we’ll see what’s happening to those who can’t afford university now.

Has anybody helped or inspired you along the way?

Oh! So many people. My parents: both English teachers. I grew up thinking poetry was normal. I used to read their poetry books. The poets helped me a lot: I grew up a short walk from Wallace  Stevens’ house, and another short walk from Mark Twain’s house: twin uncles. One of my actual uncles, Eastern European artists of the old ‘artist-intellectual’ kind, took me seriously at my most risibly adolescent, and gave me very serious books, poetry, critical essays and so on. My wonderful, hilarious, creative, open aunts. 

Michael Donaghy was an amazing teacher and mentor who not only taught about poetry, but also demonstrated a state of being, in poetry. He had tremendous faith in my work, and I’d never had that before. He gave me a leg-up.

And always I look to the invisible women of literature — well, they’re less invisible now. People like the bluestocking Anna Laetitia Barbauld, so famous in her day that she was depicted in a satirical caricature called ‘Don Dismallo Running the Literary Gantlet’. The dazzling Mary Robinson, who still in her teens wrote her wastrel husband out of debtor’s prison with poems. Letitia Pilkington, traduced by Jonathan Swift, who sold poems in 18th century London for fashionable men to pass off as their own, and then brought Dublin to a standstill with her no-holds-barred autobiography before dying at 44. And the countless doughty women writers who — at a time when, in America at least, ‘women novelists’ were just that, ghettoised — wrote the exceptional and brilliant books I read as a child. They made sure I was never short of female role models. 

I hope this poetry explosion we’re living in right now will keep exploding for a while!

What comes next?

What, for me? Well Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle, my first full collection for almost 12 years is just out (though my pamphlet Broken Cities came out in 12017), so I hope to be doing readings this year to get it out there. And of course I’m writing new stuff now, working on a new project.

What comes next for poetry? I hope this poetry explosion we’re living in right now will keep exploding for a while! New voices, new subjects, and so much more openness and inclusion. The multiplicity of it is so invigorating, I love it and am discovering new things all the time.  I wish we could get rid of this academicisation. I feel a bit strange, doing what I do when increasingly my students all have PhDs. Some of my favourite poets of the 20th century never went to university.

Tell us a secret

Too late! I had a blog for fifteen years! 

Cat, dog or reptile?

Bird.

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Katy regularly runs excellent online poetry workshops and courses and offers editing services on everything from individual poems to full collections. Go to her website to find out more and subscribe to her newsletter.