Kitty Coles : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author? 

Plath, particularly her later poems (1959 onwards). Her extraordinary grasp of the technical (alertness to rhythm and the sound of the poem when spoken aloud, imagery that’s at once startling and precise, the balance between sparseness and richness) gives her a steely control of often emotive and challenging subject matter. I find her work endlessly invigorating.

Kitty Coles : part four

How important is music to your poetry? 

Music is one of my main interests and some lyricists (e.g. Thom Yorke, Hannah Fury, Courtney Love, Katie Jane Garside) have influenced my writing. The more you write, the more you become aware how limited words are as a tool for capturing and conveying meaning. It’s impossible, really, to have another person understand what your words mean, other than on the most basic level: what I mean by ‘love’ is different from what you understand by it. Music allows you the possibility to circumvent all that.

Kitty Coles : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry? 

I find it almost impossible to write to order or from prompts. It reminds me of school, where we were required to produce poems on demand, and makes my brain shut down. For me, a poem arrives either pretty much fully formed or not at all. I sometimes encounter subject matter that I think could make for an interesting poem but if that poem doesn’t then spontaneously emerge in my head – or at least the first few lines, from which the rest can flow -  I haven’t learnt any way of forcing it.

Kitty Coles : part two

What are you working on? 

My first collection, Visiting Hours, which explores experiences of illness and recovery, is being published by The High Window in March this year so I’m currently making a few final tweaks to that. I’d been trying last year to write groups of poems which might belong together with a view to assembling some other pamphlets or collections but I’ve come to the conclusion now that I just have to write what I can and then try to find connecting threads afterwards, which is how I worked on Visiting Hours and my pamphlet, Seal Wife.

Kitty Coles : part one

Kitty Coles’ poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife (2017), was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize. Her first collection, Visiting Hours, will be published in 2020 by The High Window. www.kittyrcoles.com

How did you first engage with poetry?

Through nursery rhymes and my mum reciting ballads like ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ when I was very young. I’m still more interested in how poetry reaches us when it’s heard than when it’s read off the page. For me, the words need to feel right in the mouth and have a rightness to their sound and rhythm.