Louise Evans – Where Language, Feeling, and Music Meet in a Moment of Joy
Louise Evans arrives to the 52 for 26 project with an academic’s precision and a performer’s instinct for rhythm. Fresh from completing her doctorate, an exploration of Spanish, digital poetry, and the ways female identities are shaped and reshaped in the contemporary creative economy, Evans brings a thoughtful, multilingual sensibility to her work. She teaches Spanish at the University of Liverpool and, with Laura Ferries, co-curates the annual Pangea Poetry event, a multilingual spoken word night that has quietly become one of the city’s most distinctive fixtures.
Her writing has already appeared across a range of independent magazines and anthologies, including Give Poetry A Chance: The Anthology, Brizo Magazine, Bloom Zine and Silver Lining Zine. On stage, she’s read with groups such as the New Mersey Poets at Blast! and The Dreaming, making her a familiar name on Liverpool’s spoken word circuit.
Dreaming of You, the poem she contributes here, sits slightly apart from her usual practice. Evans often writes with performance in mind, letting sound and cadence guide her. But this poem emerged from a more intimate place. Written for one person, someone significant enough to shift the emotional landscape, it reflects on the connections made quickly, unexpectedly, and across the kind of geographical distance that might defeat lesser bonds. Evans says she usually writes from emotional extremes, and this piece comes from the brighter end of that scale.
It is also, by her own admission, touched by her fondness for The Coral, an understated nod to the way music often shapes memory, longing and mood.
In Dreaming of You, Evans offers something quiet, tender and recognisably human: the kind of poem that reminds us how even brief encounters can leave a lasting echo.
Dreaming of You
You send me memes of Coppola
After a few pints.
I know you’re thinking about me, then
Even though we’ve never really talked
About Francis Ford
Further than sitting in the dark
And silence
And my blood is pulsing in my knee as it
Feels the heat of yours
And I wrench myself back from thinking
About your hand on my knee or my hand
Or my face and concentrate
Concentrate…
They come thick and fast whilst you’re travelling
The East
Technology’s little link
While you live and breath
Your dream.
But you’re still there when I go to sleep
Reminding me of the reprieve
You bring because you listen to
Every word
And soften each outside blow
It’s like coming home.
I ask, ‘do you believe in fate?’
Because ultimately you make
Me feel that it’s real
The self-hate dissipates
And in a quiz the answer is
Francis Ford Coppola
And I laugh
Cough
Think, of course
But of course, you’re in another place.
LOUISE EVANS
