Will Harris: Passage Reading – Speakee

Poet Will Harris reads Speakee Stonehenge, an exclusive sneak peek into the collection of poems he is currently working on, Speakee.

It's a piece that keeps circling back on itself, returning to the same small moment in a room full of people, and each time it comes back it has picked something up: a piece of research, an overheard shout, a memory of a stranger's grief. Nothing is explained, and by the end a single ordinary word has quietly turned inside out. It's about who gets to belong somewhere, and how language decides that for us before we've noticed.

Will and Freya talk about writing people as names and voices rather than fully fleshed-out characters, why the most poignant moments are when someone stutters or says the wrong thing, and the danger of editing: that in smoothing out the clunky words, you can flatten everything interesting about a sentence. Plus, whether the internet and MFA culture have quietly made all our sentences sound the same.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:00:11 Speakee — the book Will is working on

00:00:32 Will reads Speakee Stonehenge

00:03:11 "Is it a poem? I don't know"

00:03:56 Writing people as names and voices

00:05:28 Why the poignant moments are the stutters

00:05:43 The exercise of transcribing overheard speech

00:07:15 Repetition, word choice and editing

00:07:58 The danger of smoothing out the difficulty

00:08:24 Has the internet made all our sentences the same?

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