Will Harris
Poet in Residence (2020 Art & Poetry)
Will Harris is a writer, essayist and editor. He participated in the 2020 ‘Art & Poetry’ residency session guest curated by Rachael Allen in partnership with Viaindustriae, Foligno. Will worked on the manuscript for a new book of poems, developed a poster poem, and printed four pamphlets of new poetry. The covers of the pamphlets took inspiration from the Nicola de Maria wall drawings in the Torre Bonomo, where he lived and worked during his residency (pictured above), and used images taken from the Italian concrete poet Serse Luigetti’s work, whose studio he had visited in Perugia.
In their introduction to the affiliated ‘Art & Poetry’ publication, to which Will also contributed, Rachael and Guy Robertson (curator, Mahler & LeWitt Studios) write:
Will Harris explores the semi-fictitious identities which people his poetry through a performative pamphleteering. Foregrounding and manipulating, as concrete poets did before him, the visual aspects of a poem on the page, he has worked closely with designer Matthew Stuart to create a wall-sized poster poem which takes inspiration from Richard Hollis’s design for Ways of Seeing. Borrowing work from the Italian concrete poet Serse Luigetti, he also made a sequence of four inter-connected and illustrated chapbooks…
To order a copy of the publication, for the price of postage, please email info@mahler-lewitt.org.
Biography In 2020 Will Harris won the Forward Arts Foundation Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection with RENDANG (2019, UK: Granta; US: Wesleyan University Press) for which he has also been nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He was the recipient of a Po- etry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation in 2019. He co-edited the Spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review with Mary Jean Chan. His essays and poems have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and The White Review, among other places.