AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

POTS: Better Broken Than Whole

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Better Broken Than Whole. Will Harris has lived in London all his life. He was born there, went to Catholic school there, wrote his first poems there. It’s where he studied and started working and fell in love and all that other stuff—it’s where he lives today. Then one time, he was standing at a stoplight in Central London, waiting to cross the street, when the guy next to him launched into a stretch and accidentally hit him. But instead of apologizing, the guy got angry: “You can’t stretch out your arms these days,” he went, “without hitting an Asian tourist in the face.”

What always strikes me when you hear that kind of racism is the certainty in it. This guy did not even hesitate for a second: Will Harris, a person he had never met, was an Asian tourist. Will Harris himself, meanwhile, whose father is white (half British, half Dutch), and whose mother is ethnically Chinese but from Indonesia, has never felt this kind of certainty. He’s always found the question, “Who am I?”, incredibly confusing. I recently talked to him about his debut collection, RENDANG, in which he allows this confusion to become his guide.

Helena de Groot: Actually, when I was reading your work, there were two questions that seemed to push themselves to the fore. And those were such large questions that I would love to ask them to you. But I’ll break them down into smaller parts. The first question is, what is a person? And the second question is, what is a poem?

Will Harris: Those are great questions.

Helena de Groot: And so if you can just answer them concisely …

Will Harris: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: … then we can get on with our day. (LAUGHS) No! I know that you have your reservations about biography. But I am still interested in your childhood. Can you tell me a little bit about the culture of your household. Like was it a very ... I don’t know, loud and boisterous one, was there a lot of storytelling, was the news important, like sort of, what was the culture of your household?

Will Harris: That’s a good question. My instinctive response is that it wasn’t quite any of those things. Neither of my parents are natural storytellers. I always feel kind of deficient compared to other writers who are so good at kind of turning their family stories into these kind of like—you know, making them part of their own becoming-a-writer narratives. But … so both my parents left school early. For various reasons, they didn’t go to university. And they’re both intelligent people. But there weren’t a lot of books around the house growing up. Though my mom did have this idea that books were important. I remember we used to—we had this mail order catalogue and I’d get books from that occasionally. So it was often books like dictionaries, thesauruses, and anthologies. They were often quite important things to me because, yeah, those are the books that I got early on. The encyclopedia, I loved that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: But there wasn’t … which is maybe characteristic of a certain kind of first generation immigrant experience, but I don’t think my mom wanted necessarily to … or was overly concerned with passing on her heritage to me.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Will Harris: We used to go back to Indonesia quite a bit. And then in the late ’90s, in ’98, there was a military coup against Suharto. And for a while it was very dangerous for Chinese Indonesians. And this has been a thing in Indonesia for centuries that in times of usually economic strife, the Chinese population of Indonesia is scapegoated.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: And so a lot of my family moved abroad at that point. And then we couldn’t go back to Indonesia for a long time. And I sometimes wonder what my relationship to it would have been if that hadn’t happened.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: Because it kind of cut it off. But so, it meant that my mom was kind of marooned in London. And yeah, I think they were both quite private people who stayed at home a lot, quite quiet people. They kind of let me do my own thing. My dad was … he bought and repaired antiques and sold them at Portobello. My mom would be out working, so my dad would take me to school. And I think that idea of working for yourself is quite a big influence on me. Yeah. I guess doing things myself, researching things, reading things, following my own interests. And actually when I started writing and taking it more seriously, my parents were both really supportive.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Will Harris: Yeah even though it was a kind of unusual course to take and probably worried them in terms of the prospects, they were both very supportive of it. And I think because they had quite unconventional careers. They weren’t, you know, doctors or lawyers or successful academics or whatever (LAUGHS) who would’ve expected me to follow in their footsteps. They’d kind of carved out their own way.

Helena de Groot: What did your mom do? I think I missed that.

Will Harris: So she did a variety of different jobs, mainly secretarial. She worked for the Bank of Indonesia, she worked for the BBC World Service in the Indonesian section. She maybe felt like she didn’t ever find the thing she wanted to do. So she always really emphasized to me how important it was to follow your ... your kind of instincts, to do what makes you happy. Which was, yeah, a really nice thing to have.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering how you see, from this distance of adulthood, how you see your childhood self. Are you close to that person?

Will Harris: I think as I’ve gotten older. And that’s actually, over the last few years more, I think I have gotten closer to that child self. When I think about my relationship to writing, I feel like maybe when I started doing it as a teenager and maybe up until my mid 20s, writing was a way to kind of suppress my child self. Because my child self was honestly quite tortured, probably, or quite confused, quite sad, quite lonely a lot of the time. And writing, when I started doing it, was this kind of … it gave me a sense of purpose. It was a way of constructing this kind of shell. This ... vessel that I could, like, escape on.

Helena de Groot: And so what was the source of your sadness?

Will Harris: I mean, that’s. I think those ... who can really say? I think a large part of the experience of being sad is it not having a source, really.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: But I guess when I was a child, I ... I’ve always had a thing about being very self-conscious. I’ve always felt quite … not at home in my home. It was quite a destabilizing thing for me when I was young, when I started being singled out and people would ask me where I was from. And I guess I grew up in quite a white area. I went to Roman Catholic, mainly Irish school, there weren’t many nonwhite kids there. And I think that probably had quite a big impact on me. And something that was never really talked about. I didn’t feel at home in my body, and I think it’s something in particular that a lot of men of East Asian heritage—it’s always dangerous to generalize—carry, this ... this pervasive sense of shame. Well, maybe it’s a kind of broader experience among people of color that, you know, feeling that you, if you don’t conform to beauty standards, that you’re ugly, that you … yeah. And in particular being an East Asian looking man ... yeah, it was a strange experience. And maybe reinforced by having a white father who, in some ways, as kind as he was, wasn’t really sensitive to that.

Helena de Groot: Temperamentally he wasn’t, or was it just the way he was brought up?

Will Harris: Well, he’s very English in the sense of being kind of taciturn. Puts more focus on actions rather than, you know, saying things … I think he never thought about it as something he had to try and understand or get his head around.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: And it was so maybe beyond his experience, maybe like a lot of white people of a certain generation.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And did you talk about it with your mom?

Will Harris: I did a bit. I … as I got older, I mean, it was a long time. I mean, the thing about shame, which is what I felt in relation to my appearance and my background, is that you don’t ... you can’t see it for a long time. Like, if you’re able to see it, then you’re able to have distance from that shame and then in some ways you’re not bound by it.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Will Harris: But as I found a way to write about it as I got older, I did talk to my mom about it. And it was really interesting to ... and I guess quite painful in some ways to hear her own experiences of institutional racism. Times where, you know, she’d have been passed over for promotions at work, times colleagues would say things to her, people would … you know, the small things that can be really scarring over a long period of time.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And what was it like to talk about it with her? Because, in a sense, maybe again this is an unfair generalization, but I feel like mothers often feel guilty for anything that they may have done to cause their child pain, even if the thing that they have done is simply pass on their genes. You know? The thing that cannot be helped. The fact that people now single you out for racist treatment, yeah ... did she ever feel like somehow this was her fault, you know?

Will Harris: Hmm. Don’t know. I mean, that could have been behind not passing on Bahasa Indonesia to me. She didn’t speak the language, I mean, there are a few little words and phrases, but … and maybe in general not instilling in me a sense of Indonesianness, because she was worried about my own ability to assimilate into English culture.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: That was probably a part of it. And again, now looking back on it, it feels quite of a piece with the experience of Chinese Indonesians more broadly. So I mentioned in ’98, there was this coup and Chinese Indonesians were targeted in the aftermath. But then in the mid ’60s, when the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was deposed, there was again this witch hunt of communists in Indonesia, which basically ended up being a way of targeting Chinese Indonesians. And during that period, my granddad was arrested and was imprisoned for a while. He managed to escape, they fled to Jakarta. So I can … when I reflected on that and still do think about that kind of longer familial history, it kind of makes sense, the pressure, the need to assimilate, to kind of blend in.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: And actually in Indonesia, my mom’s birth name was changed. She had to change it because Chinese names were … there was a government law which meant that Chinese names had to be changed in the late ’60s.

Helena de Groot: And so how old was she then when her name was changed?

Will Harris: She would’ve been small then. Maybe around five or so.

Helena de Groot: And in private, did her family keep using her Chinese name?

Will Harris: No. No.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Will Harris: Yeah. Which is kind of interesting. And actually, yeah so my grandma died in the ... during the writing of RENDANG, but I did have a couple of chances to talk to her, while I was working on it, while I was working through all of this stuff. And it was amazing how actually reticent she was talking about the past. Her refrain was always, “Why are you so interested? Why does it matter? It’s in the past.”

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Will Harris: There was never any kind of sentimentality about these things, about names, about ... yeah.

Helena de Groot: Interesting.

Will Harris: I guess some part of that is just survival, you know. And also just a way of dealing with trauma, I suppose. You just don’t ... you don’t look back. You don’t think about it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And what did you speak together?

Will Harris: We spoke a ... we spoke a maybe non-verbal language, (LAUGHS) like a bit of Bahasa Indonesia and a few English words. You can get surprisingly far. Or I’d get my mom to translate.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. And apologies for not knowing this, but if you’re part of the Chinese minority in Indonesia, would your native language be Mandarin or some other kind of Chinese or would it always be Bahasa Indonesia?

Will Harris: Yeah. It would be Bahasa Indonesia. Because there’s been a Chinese population in Indonesia since ... well, the 16th, 17th century. And I mean, as a region, Southeast Asia, it’s been ... it’s like, defined by trade, by travel, by migration.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: It’s funny how different it is to Europe and the US where, you know, nation states have such a fixed idea of how we think about these things. You know, these like fine distinctions between being like German and Italian and Swiss. Whereas in Southeast Asia it’s just, like, for as long as you … you know, for a very long time has been marked by just kind of ebbing and flowing of borders and of trade.

Helena de Groot: That is so interesting. So, because earlier you were saying that maybe one of the reasons that your mother has been hesitant to pass on her Indonesianness to you, because the safest thing to do in the UK maybe would be to assimilate, do you think that one another reason may be that she just didn’t, you know, Indonesianness was not really a stable concept that she had to pass on?

Will Harris: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s yeah. That’s a really perceptive comment. I think that’s … and very true. When I think of my mom being most herself, it’s when she is in Indonesia with her family.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: And in a way, there’s not ... you know, those are things you can’t communicate and instill and transfer. They’re tied to the place and the people. And it’s, I mean, maybe that’s quite a helpful way of looking at it, because sometimes when I really kind of punish myself internally, I think, “I’m not this, I’m not that.” I’m not English, I’m not ... I can’t at all claim to be Indonesian because I didn’t grow up there, and I can’t speak the language. But then actually, what ... what does it mean? What does it mean?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: I mean, in the case in Indonesia is a … in some ways a colonial construct. I mean, it’s a series of, what, over a thousand islands, over … around 700 different languages spoken.

Helena de Groot: Oh wow.

Will Harris: Bahasa Indonesia is a trading language. But yeah, the variety of languages is immense and the variety of different indigenous peoples. You know, I also reject the idea of there being, you know, fixed national characteristics. I think that’s a kind of damaging way of thinking and road to go down.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: I was interested in, um, a poem. I don’t know if I should call it a poem? But it’s the first page of your book.

Will Harris: Oh, yeah.

Helena de Groot: And it’s—maybe you want to describe what it looks like. And, yeah, I’d like to just know a little bit about what went into writing this block of words.

Will Harris: So I was commissioned to write something for an event and I decided to write something about rendang, partly because I’d got this email from a friend who was Malaysian and it was her mum’s rendang recipe and she’d misspelled rendang “rending.”

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Will Harris: So I just had these two words in my head. Which as many poets might have told you is how a lot of poems begin. You just have these two words and often they bear no connection. Well, they bear a very superficial kind of stupid connection (LAUGHS)—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: —which I would say these two words had. And so obviously I looked up their etymologies and they’re obviously completely unrelated, pronounced differently. And then I just started going through the other rend- words, as in words, beginning “rend” in the OED. And then so, rendang, the first cited usage in the OED is—this is the thing where, you know, when you look beneath the etymology, the definition, it would say when it was first used, and the first use in the OED was in the Washington Post in 1947. And that kind of seemed … I mean, it just, it kind of stuck in my craw, it felt kind of wrong that that was the first use. And also the idea that you’d come to that, not knowing anything about the word and just think, oh, rendang wasn’t used before 1947.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: When it refers to a Southeast Asian curry, which had been eaten for a long time before then. And actually I did do some research, and that there are earlier usages of it. Even in … in English texts.

Helena de Groot: Oh!

Will Harris: English language texts.

Helena de Groot: And they were simply not included in the corpus that the OED looks to.

Will Harris: Yeah. I mean, obviously the OED, like any dictionary, is, you know, it’s a human endeavor, and it’s shaped by the biases of people that are compiling it. And yeah, dictionaries have had, historically, this role in colonizing, which is, you know, to master languages, a way of mastering the people.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: So, you know, dictionaries—words—are not necessarily these like portals of communication. They can … there’s this kind of underside to them. And so something about arranging these words … so I arranged them in chronological order, all these rend words from the old English “rend,” was about kind of defamiliarizing our relationship, or the reader’s initial relationship to these words, so that hopefully they see them again? Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And before you start reading those words, maybe this has to do with me not being a native speaker of English, but what does it mean to rend?

Will Harris: To rend is to break apart.

Helena de Groot: Wow, that’s such a perfect word, then, for what you’re trying to do in this poem.

Will Harris: Yeah. And there is also that … this kind of etymological pun slash coincidence. Render, of course, means the opposite. So to render is to make.

Helena de Groot: Right. Do you want to read them? Just have one after the other. I’d like to hear them become strange in my ears.

Will Harris: Sure.

(READS POEM)

REND RENDER RENDER

RENDING RENDERED

RENDING RENDERING

RENDLES REND RENDERER

RENDEZVOUS RENDED

RENDERING RENDER REND

RENDY RENDRY RENDITION

RENDERABLE RENDIBLE

RENDED RENDEZVOUS

RENDEZVOUSING RENDEZ-

VOUSER RENDINLY

RENDLING RENDER SET

RENDER SET RENDLEWOOD

RENDIBLE RENDROCK

RENDZINA RENDU RENDU-

OSLER-WEBER RENDANG.

* * *

Helena de Groot: It is indeed so hypnotic. It’s after a while nothing means anything anymore and then some words really stick out like, oh, rendezvous. That mirrors rendang in a sense, right, that rendezvous obviously already was around for quite a while, in French, before they were like, oh, this is an English word, too, now, I suppose.

Will Harris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And then made it into rend-, I can’t even pronounce it. Rendezvousing? I don’t know. (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: Not an often used word.

Helena de Groot: No.

Will Harris: Yeah. There are some very kind of apt words in there, like, rendable, means capable of being translated, rendition is obviously ... is to, like, take possession of something and now has this connotation of extraordinary rendition. Which is when a government extradites someone from another state, usually without going through the formal process of extradition. So they just kidnap them.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Will Harris: Yeah. And Rendrock is a type of explosive.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Will Harris: Kind of like dynamite.

Helena de Groot: And is it like a brand name then? Or what kind of word is that?

Will Harris: Yeah, I guess that would have been, yeah that would have been a brand name from the 1870s in the US.

Helena de Groot: And so when you see these … I mean, you said that you started off this poem by seeing this silly connection, not a true connection, between “rending,” the verb, and “rendang,” the dish, and that you just got interested in all the other words that start with rend. But so now that you do see them together and you see that quite a lot of them are about this sort of state sanctioned violence or maybe the kind of ...

Will Harris: Explosion, breaking apart ...

Helena de Groot: Exactly. Yeah. What does it ... how do you interpret that then, you know? Do you think that there is some kind of mystical connection there or how do you see that?

Will Harris: I mean, there’s only a mystical connection in that every word has this kind of halo of connotation. If you bring it together with other words, they will create a kind of fission or, you know, they’ll spark connections like that. I mean … so going back to when I was talking about my experience growing up and not being able to square how I looked to the world with how I felt. You know, this weird thing that people would recognize me as other and I would not necessarily feel other inside.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: There’s this idea that Stuart Hall has. He talks about race as a floating signifier.

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Will Harris: And I think that’s … it’s such an important idea. Because we often have this idea that race is a fixed brand.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: You know, that you are ... what, East Asian, that you are Indian, that you are Black, that you are—but these things change and they change in the context in which you’re in. And that’s what’s so important. I mean, racism works by convincing you that those meanings are fixed, that, you know, certain phenotypical traits correlate to certain behaviors, which correlate to where you were born, which correlate to who your parents were, which correlate to your IQ. You know, this restless idea of categorization and definition. And when I see those words, I see my experience. I see floating signifiers. I see arbitrary connections which make up a kind of identity which is contingent and shifting.

Helena de Groot: And so do you think when you see then those connections that are almost uncanny, right, do you think that those connections are in the word or in you?

Will Harris: Yeah, they’re in whoever reads them.

Helena de Groot: Ah! It’s almost like a Rorschach test or something. Where what you see is who you are.

Will Harris: Yeah, exactly. That’s how I see it. And that’s the joy of poetry. Or of a particular kind of poetry that’s meant a lot to me. I mean, I think actually all poetry, I mean, the poems I first got excited about when I started reading, I loved John Ashbery. I loved these kind of early Auden poems, I loved Wallace Stevens—stuff that felt kind of, like, magical, like spells, where words were slightly defamiliarized and suddenly I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t care what they meant, really.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: When you said that one of the first poets that you started reading was John Ashbery—that is quite an unusual first poet, I would say, because he’s not exactly, sort of an easy way in. So how did you come to him?

Will Harris: Yeah. I came to him because there was a … I had another friend who was really into poetry, and he had an anthology of New York poets published by Carcanet here, which had Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. So I borrowed that book off him and I read it. And I obviously love Frank O’Hara. But then I really loved John Ashbery. I think he took a bit longer to click than O’Hara. But then when he did, I just was ... I just yeah, I thought it was amazing. There’s something about the music of it that I still remember that, you know, at the opening of it, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror …

(RECORDING OF JOHN ASHBERY PLAYS)

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Will Harris: You know, “As Parmigianino did it, the right hand / Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer / And swerving easily away, as though to protect / What it advertises.”

(RECORDING OF JOHN ASHBERY PLAYS SIMULTANEOUSLY)

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand

Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer

And swerving easily away, as though to protect

What it advertises.

Will Harris Like, I think when I first read it, I just read it for the sounds, I hadn’t looked up the Parmigianino self-portrait, I almost just heard that word and I just loved the sound of it. And the sound of that phrase, “As Parmigianino did it.” Which was kind of weird and estranging, and that use of the word “advertises,” “as though to protect / What it advertises.” It’s just … I think … well, okay so partly I was drawn to it because I knew that he kind of had a reputation of being difficult. The idea of liking something difficult.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Will Harris: And that was a bit inscrutable. And …

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris” … hard to get, I think as all teenagers are. And I guess because that mirrored how I thought of myself, and I wanted to master a language which was also inscrutable. But I also loved the way he connected emotions. In fact, I was … I don’t remember if I was reading or listening to an interview with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who’s one of my favorite poets, and she talks about how for her, a poem’s concreteness doesn’t come from visual images, but that emotions themselves can be concrete. And that immediately made me think of Ashbery. And that to me, you know, the emotions are concrete, but it’s not visually concrete in the sense that, you know, sometimes when people describe a poem they’ll describe it as like a film, you know, where you can imagine the scene and you’re being led through it from one place to another, one room to another. You’re following an “I” of a real person in real space. But that is not how it works in Ashbery poems, it doesn’t work in Berssenbrugge poems. But to me, they are absolutely clear because you have this clarity of emotion, you’re being led through from one emotion to another and they flow on.

Helena de Groot: And can you give me an example of, maybe, in an Ashbery poem, that you can follow the emotional state of the lyric “I”?

Will Harris: Um … Okay, so this bit:

What should be the vacuum of a dream

(RECORDING OF JOHN ASHBERY PLAYS SIMULTANEOUSLY)

What should be the vacuum of a dream

Becomes continually replete as the source of dreams

Is being tapped so that this one dream

May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose,

Defying sumptuary laws, leaving us

To awake and try to begin living in what

Has now become a slum.

Will Harris: So (LAUGHS) that extract … to me, it’s not … sometimes when you talk poems at school, you know, it’s like, what is the image that corresponds to how you’re feeling and how can you develop that? How can you make the reader, you know, touch, taste, smell, hear it? To me that, the “cabbage rose, / Defying sumptuary laws”—you know, sumptuary laws are laws to do with how you dress, your clothing. That doesn’t make sense. And also the dream “waxing” like a moon waxes. So you’ve got all these things which are clashing and which don’t make the main simile “like a cabbage rose” more … more vivid. If anything, they make it kind of fuzzier. But to me, they make it more emotionally vivid.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: Maybe it comes back to your second question at the beginning, “What is a poem?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: So there’s one, there’s one answer to that question, which is that a poem is just vivid, memorable language. It’s a way of communicating an experience of being somewhere and doing something in the way that’s most vivid and maybe kind of boils it down to some kind of epiphanic moment or insight.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Will Harris: For me ... what I get from poems is this sense of being opened out to something. Not things being distilled and boiled down. But that language is … is not being used in its conventional way, that grammar is being pushed up against, that images are being pushed up against. And that I get a sense of possibility. So we hear, when Ashbery says, “this one dream / May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose, / Defying sumptuary laws,” I get this … I don’t … I can’t picture anything. I mean, I kind of picture a cabbage and I picture some clothing and picture a moon at the same time. But it’s not … you know, if that was a workshop, creative writing workshop, I can imagine a certain kind of tutor being like, what are you trying to … what’s the image here? What do you want to leave the reader with? And you would cut that. You would lose this kind of openness, this sense of these different ideas and images existing at the same time.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: I don’t know if I’ve convinced you or explained it.

Helena de Groot: It is not about convincing me, right. I’m just so interested in that, because you just mentioned the writing workshop and how maybe the tutor would say, pick one image, you know, don’t give me all three. And so I’m wondering, when you were writing poems, I mean, anything that we start doing, we’re bad at, right. So I’m not trying to make a personal comment or something. But I suppose, you know, your first poems maybe still needed some work or something. But so how do you diagnose what’s wrong with your own poems when you already instinctively know that a writing workshop is not the place?

Will Harris: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if that is true of poems, that, you know, when you start out, you’re always bad at it. It’s true of maybe driving a car or, like, a forklift truck.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: But I think ... I think maybe with the arts, with painting, with poetry, there are some technical things, which you can learn and get better at. But the core of it ... like I often … I often think I’m always trying to get back to the excitement I felt when I first started writing poems, when I first started combining words and the amazing connections that you can make. I … yeah, I really, I still really like the first poems I wrote when I was a teenager.

Helena de Groot: Do you have one of them around?

Will Harris: Are you suggesting that I … I read one of them?

Helena de Groot: Would that be an improper thing to ask?

Will Harris: I … could do, yeah. I could do, yeah, why not?

Helena de Groot: Yeah! I’m just so interested in, like, is that excitement still visible on the page. You know?

Will Harris: Yeah, that’s a good point. Sometimes you can … you’re not conveying the excitement you’re feeling. But I think it’s more often the case that you just … you can lose it. You can lose the feel for words.

Helena de Groot: Because you’re thinking about them … too explicitly or why?

Will Harris: Um … (LONG SILENCE)

Helena de Groot: Because, okay, here’s my question. I have a better way to formulate this question. Because I’ve been thinking about this ever since I started interviewing poets for this podcast, you know. I always want to know, when you sit down to write your first poem, do you … did you know that you were writing a poem, or were you just playing with words and then later you said, “Oh, this must be a poem.” Because to me, it just seems so paralyzing to tell yourself, “Okay, now I am going to write a poem.” I think I would be … I wouldn’t be able to write a single word if that’s the task I’d set myself.

Will Harris: Yeah. Completely. But I think that sense only kicks in after you’ve been doing it for a period of time.

Helena de Groot: Ahh.

Will Harris: Like, I don’t know, like when you try and learn an instrument and you make, and you realize you can make a melody. And then you just become really obsessed with that, really excited by it. And then you get to a certain point where you suddenly are aware of yourself playing the guitar or the piano, or that you could write something yourself. And then all the different ways you could do it, the weight of possibility kind of crushes you. And that’s when you start falling back on things like technique and … or, you know, when you start reading and looking at other people and, like, thinking, I couldn’t do this, how do they do that, I want … and you lose a sense of that initial joy in combination.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: I … okay, so I could share with you what I think is maybe the first poem I wrote.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, let’s hear it.

Will Harris: So when I started as a teenager, maybe when I was about 14, 15, and I—so I still have this document which I move onto each computer I get, which I saved as “physics coursework” because I was really embarrassed about writing poems.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: And it’s got … yeah. It’s got a lot of poems in it. And so this is the first one.

(READS POEM)

I waited under the tree in spring

with leaves spreading long

fingers fear no more, the heat

of the sun nor the furious

rages of winter. Still, it is

black shoes throng pieced together

in the dark. Scared white flashes flicker

past and others laugh. Still,

the leaves are large and cast

a shadow in which I sit and wait

by the tree in spring for the

summer.

* * *

Helena de Groot: Wow! I can’t believe this is the first poem. I mean, it seems … do you know if you went through many drafts, did this just come sort of pouring out?

Will Harris: I have no idea.

Helena de Groot: You don’t.

Will Harris: Although I do remember that, yeah, I was part of a—there was an online poetry forum which I would share poems on and comment on. You know, it was like a kind of early … I don’t know, would you call it like, it was pre Web 2.0.

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Will Harris: So when the comment board was still really popular. And I would often just write poems directly into the little ... into the thing where you would share it. And that was really generative for me. So.

Helena de Groot: And did you have like, an avatar or was it you with your real name?

Will Harris: Yes. I did. No, it wasn’t me.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: It definitely wasn’t me. Luckily I can’t remember what my avatar was, my name.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: But it was really great. It was great practice because there was a rule that you had to comment on three poems, I think, for every one you posted. So it got you really, you know, which I think is good practice, generally. And it made you really good at reading and other people’s work and offering feedback and everyone, you know, you get to know the people on it through their poems and—

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Will Harris: I mean, I actually really vividly remember these little moments when you get a sense of someone’s offline life coming through.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: Like, the one guy that would clearly, like, post when he was drunk and he’d apologize the next day and be like, “I’m going through a rough time.” And it was really amazing and kind of quite exciting to me as a teenager. You know, this idea that I was like sharing work with like, adults and—

Helena de Groot: Of course.

Will Harris: A real person.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. And did that then invite you to also share things about your life, or were you trying not to?

Will Harris: No, I think I was trying to kind of act the role of an adult person.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: (LAUGHS) So I didn’t reference being at school or arguing with my English teacher or anything like that.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: When you continued writing poems, was there a moment at which you did want to include parts of your life? I mean, because in the poems that were published in RENDANG, it’s definitely not sort of in the confessional mode or something, you know, but there are snippets that seem definitely biographical. So when did you make that turn?

Will Harris: Yeah. I think it’s quite important to me that they’re not confessional or read in that way. But I guess there was a point at which I became more comfortable with using my life as material. Because prior to that, I’d really not wanted to. I’d found the idea really icky. I mean, I thought there was nothing interesting there at all, about me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: Which, you know, is true, largely. But then it just took me further and further away from that, like, early joy in writing poems. And I would write stuff that was ultimately insincere. And then I’d look at it a month later and I’d be like, what does that mean? What was I trying to express? Why did I say that? Who wrote that? And so the shift I think with the book, my attitude changed in that I started to see the poems as poems of encounter. And they were poems that weren’t about expunging stuff that was inside of me. They were about going into the world and meeting people and about my friendships and about the strangers that I came into contact with. And obviously, in the process of doing that, I had those conversations reflected back on me. And I responded to things people said because of my own, my own history, my own heritage, or heritages.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Will Harris: And that’s kind of how I see myself within that work. It’s there, but only in the kind of gaps in between other people, which is basically how I see myself in society as a person as well. And that was actually also a very freeing realization in terms of just writing. You know, realizing it actually doesn’t matter. So many writers, I mean, I put so much pressure on myself. I was like, who am I? What am I trying to say? But the words, in a sense, are already there. It’s about how you access it, how you convey it onto the page.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if you wanted to read that quite long poem, “SAY.” Because I think it touches upon some of the things that you’re talking about now. It’s on page 61. Or it starts there. And could you introduce the poem before we dive into it?

Will Harris: So I wrote this poem after, for me, a fairly long period of not writing. And it was partly because my dad had been very ill. He had cancer and … I don’t … I just basically, I didn’t feel like writing it. It didn’t affect me in a necessarily straightforward way. But then he recovered kind of amazingly quickly. And then I was going away with some friends for a short holiday. And on the flight—and I’m usually really scared of flying—I had this Ryanair boarding pass printed out and I just started writing this poem. And then I worked on it for the next couple of months.

Helena de Groot: Hmm. There are a few other things that I’d like to know before we start. You mention Rilke’s flow. What is that and what does it mean to you?

Will Harris: So, it’s a command from one of the Orpheus sonnets. And I guess it’s a word I associate with Rilke. He’s this amazing poet of flow. I mean, he wrote in a flow, you know, in these sudden flurries of direct inspiration.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: And his poems seem to have this kind of higher connection with language, with the natural landscape. Everything seems to be kind of one, for the duration of the poet’s recitation. And that’s maybe contained in the idea flow. That things need to be able to have, like, smooth transit between their parts. And whereas breakage, which is the other main force in this poem, flow and break, is this idea that things can’t always flow. That actually, maybe a poem, like a society and like a person, is composed of little ruptures, parts which don’t connect up, which don’t make sense, which don’t add up to something. And maybe, like I was saying earlier, there was this pressure when I was little, which was implicit, but there, to assimilate. And actually I realized much later that that was also just part of the time in which I grew up. The New Labour was in government and they put big pressure on this idea of multiculturalism. This idea of integration. This idea of Britain as this melting point, and a melting pot is something which burns down on all the different ... you know, all the different parts into one substance. One kind of flowing liquid. And actually, that’s kind of a violent impulse in lots of ways.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: And in some ways, breakage can be a more generous one. If you admit that a society doesn’t have to be whole, but it can be composed of broken parts. Then that’s kind of generous to the people in it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Mm. Do you want to read the poem, “SAY”?

Will Harris: Yeah, sure. Just take a sip of water.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a long one. (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: It’s quite a long one.

(READS POEM)

SAY

A brick-sized block of grey stone washed ashore on which was carved

the word SAY. My dad picked it up at low tide and two months later found another, and another saying LES. We worked out that rather than a command – like Rilke’s flow – it was the name of an old firm, SAYLES, which sold refined sugar, with plantations in the Caribbean and a factory in Chiswick. As capital flows, accumulates and breaks its bounds, so too had SAYLES broken into various subsidiaries. Slipped, dissolved and loosed. You find all kinds of things at low tide. One time, a black retriever came wagging up to me with a jawbone in its mouth. What can’t be disposed of otherwise – what can’t be broken down – is taken by the river, spat out or lodged

in mud. The SAY brick took pride-of-place on our chest of drawers –

masonry, defaced by time, made part of the furniture. My dad decided

to give it to you, in part because you’re an artist and he thought it looked like

art, but also, which is maybe the same, because it suggested reason

in madness, and made him – made us – less afraid. Last week, there was an

acid attack. Two cousins, assumed to be Muslim, having torn off their

clothes, lay naked on the curb, calling for help. Passers-by crossed the road.

Things break, not flow; it is impossible, however lovely, to see the whole

of humanity as a single helix rotating forever in the midst of universal time.

Flow, break, flow. That’s how things go. Is it? What are you trying

to say?

After the operation, they stapled shut his stomach. As the scars

healed, it became harder to discuss. He drank as if he had no body – nothing

said, admitted to or broken. Flow, break, flow. Gather up the fragments.

Now he is back to saying The country’s full. Why are they all men? Four months ago, in a flimsy hospital gown, the fight had almost left him. In a tone you’d use to distract a child, the nurse told my mum about her holiday to Sumatra in the early ’90s. He likes custard, she replied. We told him when

to cough and when to breathe. He clasped a button that controlled

the morphine. Bleep. Bleep. What did the blue and green lines mean?

The sudden dips? What was the nurse’s name? I chose not to

keep notes. Thoughtful as moss or black coffee, or as the screen of

a dead phone. That’s what eyes look like when you really look at them.

Inanimate. Moss, though, is alive enough to harvest carbon dioxide,

to grow. Yesterday I googled thoughtful as moss, thinking it was from

a Seamus Heaney poem, but only found a description of the poet

“grown long-haired / And thoughtful; a wood-kerne // Escaped from

the massacre”. At school, we learnt that wood-kernes were armed

peasants who fought against the British in Ireland. I imagined them

(and him) as thoughtful kernels, seeds that had escaped death by being

spat out. I am nothing so solid or durable. What are you trying

to say?

For years I made patterns in the air, not knowing what to say,

then you came and pointed out the paintwork cracked and bubbling

on the wall beside my bed which, though it stank, I hadn’t noticed.

The streetlight sparked on beads of damp. Your skin smelt bready, warm.

I couldn’t say how bare my life had been. The stillness in the room

was like the stillness in the air between the heaves of storm. We flowed

into and out of each other, saying – what? Saying. Not yet together,

we were incapable of breaking. Cradled in pure being. The paint flaked,

exposing streaks of poxy wall. I remembered a church where the saints’

faces had been scratched away, taking on a new expression: alien,

afraid. Some days I must look alien to him. Scary. One poet said

the devil was neither blate nor scaur, incapable of being scared. I sleep

scared most nights but feel no more holy. Once I pronounced “oven”

often like my mum does, and a friend laughed. The cracks appeared

beneath me. In the years before we met, though I wrote, I was too scared –

too scarred – to speak. Flow, flow, flow. I wanted to be carried along, not

spat out or upon. That SAY brick picked from the riverbed proved that

broken things still flow. What are you trying to say? When you asked

me that I closed my laptop, offended. Why? It never mattered what

I said. Whether you speak up or scarcely whisper, you speak with all

you are. To the eye of a being of incomparably longer life – to God

or the devil – the human race would appear as one continuous vibration,

in the same way a sparkler twirled at night looks like a circle. In darker days

I couldn’t say that to my dad, slumped in front of the TV with a mug

of instant coffee. Saying it now only makes me think of times I’ve held

a sparkler – the hiss and flare, the after-smell – which runs counter

to that whole vision. One morning, gagging on his breathing tube,

he started to text my mum, but before he could press send his phone

died. He couldn’t remember what he tried to say. I can’t remember

what I tried to say. Flow, break, flow. You hear me, though?

* * *

Helena de Groot: Thank you so much.

Will Harris: Yeah. I didn’t read that poem for a long time.

Helena de Groot: Why?

Will Harris: It’s quite ... it’s quite intense.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: I always forget, when I read it again, it actually does take quite a lot out of me. It’s kind of ... I think it’s there in the way in which I wrote it, too. As in I wrote the first draft very intensely and then I worked on it very intensely, but it still feels kind of like a breathless kind of unloading or regurgitation of so much stuff I’d been feeling and thinking and wanting to express for a really … a really long time.

Helena de Groot: And so when you read it now, are there things that still surprise you? That you almost rediscover. Like, oh, I knew that then already. Why do I keep wanting to find it out?

Will Harris: Yeah, completely. Yeah. I mean, also just, it’s funny, reading it in the context of this interview, I do feel like it says a lot of the things I’ve tried to express to you but probably more ...

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Will Harris: … succinctly and more clearly. And it makes me wonder why I even bother. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I know. I could have just asked, what’s a person, what’s a poem, and have you read this poem, and done! You know?

Will Harris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So what’s a part that still surprised you on reading it now?

Will Harris: Actually, the bit about my dad saying the country is full, why are they all men. I mean, that’s, it’s quite a painful revelation, which I know is coming to a lot of people of mixed … mixed heritage, which is that sometimes you can have a white parent who will say racist things. And not really realize the connection or how it affects their own … their own children.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: And, yeah, I guess. Describing, the stapling of the stomach, and then the moment where the nurse talks about her holiday to Sumatra. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes. (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: Because I guess, like I say in the poem, I didn’t take notes. So that moment did take on extra power because it was something which I did just remember five months later was, her describing her holiday and then my mum saying he likes custard.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: That, like, hits me on some subterranean level that I still don’t fully understand. It almost feels like I’m calling out the nurse for saying that. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t. It’s just, when you’re in an ICU and someone’s just about survived a life-threatening operation, and someone’s talking about their holiday to a place where your family has this painful link, it’s … there’s no point to be made of it other than that it’s incongruous and it’s strange and it is kind of painful in a way that’s hard to make sense of.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, I liked that interaction in particular, because it does illustrate this break. Instead of the conversation flowing, instead of it being a dialogue where the nurse talks about her holiday in Sumatra, and then your mom says, “Oh yeah, where did you go? Oh, well, my…”, you know, this and that … grew up there or so and so. Which was sort of, I suppose, what was expected of your mom in that setting. And then instead she breaks that whole line of conversation and just sort of diverts it back to your dad, who needs care. “He likes custard.” I thought it was quite powerful to get a breakage of dialogue onto the page, you know? We so rarely do that. Whereas they’re full of … you know, so many of our dialogues are broken. Right. When you …

Will Harris: Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: I don’t know! Like a piece of small talk that you’re not feeling like, how can I shut this down as quickly as possible? I mean, there’s so much breakage.

Will Harris: And broken speech is amazing. I mean, as any therapist will tell you, it’s always the most revealing. It’s funny, when we invent speech, we always make it continuous. But when you actually transcribe someone talking, as probably if you transcribe me talking (LAUGHS) to you, there are all these little leaps and moments where it doesn’t follow. And those are often the bits where something’s been said.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I’m also interested in this poem because it’s also like a meta poem, right, where you wonder throughout the poem, from that first scene where a “brick-sized block of grey stone washed ashore on which was carved the word SAY,” you know, it seems almost like, you know, like a deus ex machina or whatever, something dropping from the sky that is like, “What do you want to say, poet, say it already!” And so there’s a lot of this, you know, what do you want to say, I can’t remember what I tried to say. “You hear me, though?” So in that sense, it seems like asking questions about what is this poem? But then at the same time, it does have these flickers of biography, like when you talk about your dad with the staples in his stomach. When you talk about the political context in which he’s saying the country’s full, why are they all men. Probably … is this Brexit or is this before?

Will Harris: This was Brexit time.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right.

Will Harris: Though, I mean, that rhetoric has been around for a long time.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And then those two cousins, assumed to be Muslims, who were lying on the curb, having torn off their clothes. You know, an acid attack. There are these flickers of the real that come into this poem that seems at the same time to be a meditation on what is a poem.

Will Harris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so, I’m wondering how you marry those two things, like how you keep those two bound together in one poem instead of them shredding the poem apart.

Will Harris: I think in this poem I was explicitly trying to both let myself go, to like, indulge whatever I felt like writing, but also to write against myself. And so I think using the structure of a refrain, “What are you trying to say?”, which is this thing that my partner did say to me one time a couple of years before. I’d been working on this essay for ages and, you know when you work on a piece of writing and it gets more and more arcane (CROSSTALK)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Convoluted? Yes.

Will Harris: You start bringing in more things.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah, totally.

Will Harris: And I think she came back from work one day and I was slumped over my laptop, and she was like, “What are you trying to say?” And I wanted to have both of those sides in the poem.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: I wanted to have these parts in it which felt random or besides the point, which took it in another direction. But then I also want to have that feeling of tightness, of it coming back, of someone pushing against it. I guess the mind … the way it works when you’re straining against something which is painful to look at, painful to see, where you can’t bring yourself to focus on it for the full duration.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Will Harris: Like when I read this ... actually, when I read this poem, one thing, if I’m honest, this stanza about the “thoughtful as moss” one, with the Seamus Heaney bit about wood kerns and colonels and that wordplay, which is basically kind of inconsequential and kind of dumb. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Will Harris: Every time I think, I could have cut that. And it probably would have made it a better poem or a stronger poem in some ways. But then I also kind of admire … like, I admire the fact I let that stay in. Because it is a very long-winded way of getting to the point of saying, “I am nothing so solid or durable.” And for me, knowing the way I think, the way I write, I needed to write through to that point and to include those random thoughts and little homophonic leaps. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I’m so interested in that, as you say, inconsequential paragraph. Yeah, the fact that you let it stay. Because that question, “What are you trying to say?”, it has a certain violence, right? It’s sort of like, please just spit it out, you know?

Will Harris: Yeah, just spit it out.

Helena de Groot: Yeah! And so when you choose the poem to say things in, instead of ... who knows what, a political speech or, an essay, you know, there are so many ways to say what we want to say. But so, what does it mean to you to say what you want to say inside a poem?

Will Harris: Well, exactly. I mean, I think it’s really useful to see it in those terms, because you’re choosing the path of not saying, you know, you’re not writing a speech about something which is important, or like an article in a newspaper, or ... you’re not using a form of language which could effect material change in the world, which would be unquestionably positive.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Will Harris: But you’re kind of holding in tension the parts of language which are meaningless and which are still charged with a desire to communicate. And which almost can’t be communicated. So I guess the part of the poem where I slightly resolve this tension is in that line about, “Whether you speak up or scarcely whisper, you speak with all you are.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: That saying is this constant thing that you’re always doing.

Helena de Groot: Right!

Will Harris: Which would be separate from like, an act of communication even?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: And I think that’s another thing that people can get wrong. You know? If I wanted to communicate with someone, I would write clearly. I would write in a different way. But I don’t write poems to communicate in that way.

Helena de Groot: But okay, so because this is such an interesting line to me, and it’s from Merleau-Ponty, no? “Whether you speak up or scarcely whisper, you speak with all you are.”

Will Harris: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. When your mom is by your father’s bed in the hospital and talking to this nurse who’s talking about her holiday, and she says, “He likes custard.” What was she saying with all she is?

Will Harris: Yeah. I think I made a note with that line from when I was reading Merleau-Ponty and a few of the other phenomenologists. Maybe there’s something in the idea of phenomenology which struck a chord in terms of how I communicate with my mom, how my mom is communicating with my dad when he was, like, high on morphine after this operation, how I communicate with my grandma, or how I did when she was alive, even though we couldn’t speak the same language ... which is that there’s a kind of communication which arises from intimacy. You know, which accretes around gestures and words, but which isn’t about what they’re explicitly communicating.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Will Harris: Yeah. I mean, when I think of custard, I will always think of my dad. And I’ll think of a particular kind of custard, I’ll think of … I don’t know what kind of custard you have in the US, but here we have a kind of powdered custard that you mix with hot water and stir in that was particularly popular when my dad was a kid. And, you know, it’s kind of like a school meal custard that you have with sponge, and that my dad still really loves. It’s like, very sweet and very synthetic.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Will Harris: And maybe there’s something about that powdered custard, which is my dad. And which also expresses the relationship that me and my mom have to my dad. Yeah. (LONG PAUSE) And that is my understanding of how phenomenology works.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right. Right. That your love for your dad is inside the powdered custard.

Will Harris: Exactly. Exactly.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020, as well as the chapbook (or as the English say ‘pamphlet’) All this is implied, which was picked as London Review Bookshop Pamphlet of the Year. He also published a book-length essay titled Mixed-Race Superman and teaches for The Poetry School in London. You can find the essay he wrote about the poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge via the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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