5 poems Harris Wheeler saw

Feat. a fictional barn and a dead fly

Happy June, sweet readers. Welcome back to 5 Poems, a monthly series where a special guest shares five poems they found out in the world. These aren’t your standard poems—they might not even have words. Instead, they’re moments, gestures, vignettes, asides, and any jewel of existence that resonates as only a poem could.

Today’s guest poem collector is Harris Wheeler, a poet, artist, and event organizer based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. I met Harris when they started dating a good friend of mine (Henry, the genius behind Pop Empire) and was quickly taken by their sweet demeanor, their cool, sometimes puckish style, and their poetry. In addition to keeping up with their own creative practice (they’re releasing a chapbook at the end of this month—more on that in the interview), Harris curates and hosts a monthly reading series called Domestic Water at Conveyor Belt Books in Covington, Kentucky. Their poems have been published in Wonder, Dirt Child, Hobart, and elsewhere.

Harris is such a great writer, and they have excellent taste in weird little found poems as you shall soon see. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and keep your eyes peeled for their chapbook. It’s gonna be quite good!

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Katrina: When did you start writing, or just being creative in general?

Harris: I actually remember really enjoying writing stories when I was in first or second grade. They would give us fun writing prompts for stories and I had this classic composition notebook that I would write them in. And I remember writing one about a cornfield and I felt like it was my masterpiece at the time.

What was the cornfield one in response to, do you remember?

No. [Laughs]

I always liked writing. I always liked having notebooks, and I always was a big reader growing up. My dad was really into fiction, and he loves fantasy novels and comic books and stuff. But I feel like that made me want to read all the time.

And I started writing poetry when I was in high school.

Do you remember the first poem you wrote where you were like, “Hell yeah.”

Not really, but I remember writing something about the moon where I was like, “This is something.”

What do you think made you want to write poetry?

I didn’t read poetry growing up. I wasn’t exposed to it except for, like, Robert Frost and whatever they teach you in school. But I just had an instinct. I had a little notebook in high school that I would scribble into. And I didn’t even know it was poetry.

You’re just, like, a poet. Inescapably.

Yeah, it just comes naturally to me. [Laughs]

I would say that you are a pretty serious practicing poet. When did you pivot to being more invested in it?

In college, I went to the Art Academy of Cincinnati. I went for photography, initially. But there was a little writing scene there, and it just kind of drew me in. I loved going to the readings that were there, so all throughout college I took as many writing classes as I could and just read a lot. There was no creative writing major when I started, it was only a minor. Then they made it into a major my senior year so I switched. I was the only one in the major (it’s a really small school), so I basically did whatever I wanted.

It was a pretty non-traditional writing education—because it’s just a visual arts school—which I’m glad about. I’m kind of glad I didn't go through a writing program because I feel like it can mold you to be a certain way, and I’m glad I got to just do my own thing.

I didn’t know that you studied photography.

I studied photography that first year, but then I switched to sculpture most of my time.

Do you feel like there’s any crossover from what you learned in photography and sculpture in your writing?

Yeah. For both, I would say. I was looking at language through a sculpture lens almost the whole time that I was there, just thinking of language as object and looking at concrete poetry. My assignments were visual art assignments so it was kind of a fun thing—kind of like what you do with 5 poems. Like, what can be a poem? So that’s how I was approaching sculpture. I was kind of trying to filter it all through the same thing.

Can you talk more about concrete poetry?

Yeah! I don't know that much about it. But my cloud poem was sort of an attempt at, or inspired by concrete poetry. It’s kind of freeing the language from its intended meaning.

The way that I was trying to employ it or deploy it was, like, when you put two found objects together in a sculpture that have their preconceived purpose, and then free them of that purpose, I feel like something can happen. And so I was trying to do that with language, too.

Do you have an example, off the top of your head, of two objects or two words where that kind of happens?

When I was in school, I was also really into not spending any money on my art practice. That made me feel triumphant. So I would just get random stuff from Indigo Hippo or or household items. But I did this one sculpture where I took an outlet cover and put unlit wicks through the holes.

I feel like when I write, I like to use words that might cause a certain type of reader to be like, “This doesn’t make sense. You don’t use this word to describe this type of thing.” I don’t know why this pair randomly came to mind, but an example is: iridescent daughter.

Oh yeah! Yes.

It’s just a random example. But it’s not an expected pairing. And someone could be annoyed by it. Like, “I don't know what that means.”

Right. But then… each person has an association.

Yeah, it’s like—what does it feel like it means to you? Is that similar to what you’re describing when you talk about freeing objects or words of their purpose?

Totally. Yeah. I mean, in that in the cloud poem that I have, that’s gone through a lot of different drafts. But the first version of it was in three parts, and the word “cloud” is repeated a ton in that version. And in the second version and then the third version it basically gets reduced to just being the word “cloud” repeated over and over again. And it was really fun to read that out loud because people would start laughing at the word being repeated so many times.

That kind of work is nice for performance, too.

Yeah! I feel like thinking of it this way pulls the reader in to make creative decisions of their own. They get to have their own experience. It forces them to be involved because they have to think about their associations and define their meaning. It’s not being handed to them.

Exactly.

What does your day to day creative practice look like right now?

I don’t really have a hard routine. I very much just write when I can, or even just when I feel like it. For work I wait tables and I work four days a week, and then I have three days off. So usually it’s on those off days that I will find myself wanting to write.

But I’ve realized that I don’t really love the generating process of creating a draft. I like to have something that’s already there that I can then edit. That’s what I enjoy doing way more.

I have a lot of phone notes of just, like, random things that I’ll think of throughout the day, and that’s nice to have material there that I can then play with. Because when I’m just looking at a blank page it can be paralyzing. So sometimes it’s just tinkering with stuff. But also reading is really important to my writing practice. I feel like it’s nice to have an input. It’s not a specific, certain time of day or anything like that.

I also want ask you how creativity kind of shows up in the day to day. It sounds like keeping phone notes is one way.

Yes, voice notes too, for sure. Also, some friends and I have recently started a writing collective called FTP.

What does that stand for?

The idea of it came from the term File Transfer Protocol, which I think Charles Gable brought up. But we decided to just make it FTP and have it be a stand in for all kinds of things that you could think of. Obviously, Fuck The Police is one of the main FTPs, which is great, but it can also be For The People, For The Poets, Flimmering Total Pansy…

So we have been having monthly meetings where, if we have work to share, we share it and read it, and people make comments and suggest things, and we just talk about it. It’s really nice to have that accountability to write something, to have something to look forward to, to share. So that has really helped me be motivated to write things.

How long has the collective been going on?

We’ve been having meetings for three or four months now. They’re helping me put my chapbook together.

Tell us about your chapbook!

It’s called Dreams from the Grass Stage. It is 22 pages long. It’s full of really breezy, short poems. Mostly what I tend to write is shorter poems. There’s a lot of animal imagery in there, weirdly, which wasn’t intentional. Someone else pointed that out. And there is some stuff about dreaming and fantasy and the experience of presenting to the world as a woman, and kind of gender dysphoria a little bit, but also kind of hyper femme stuff going on in there. It’s fun. I think there’s some humor in some of the poems.

When is it going to be out?

The book release will be June 30th at Conveyor Belt. It looks really good, which I’m really excited about. The covers were printed by Pull Club here in town, and they did a great job.

I can’t wait to get one.

Yay!

So you know the five poem series is kind of like, anything is poem. What’s a poem to you?

Wow. I guess what excites me about poetry is the ability to make language do weird things, and using meaning in a different way than conversational language.

When I was in school and kind of thinking of sculpture as poem and language as object and all of this stuff, I think it has a lot to do with the assemblage, what’s actually around the language or object or whatever it is that is present. Like, what does it conjure up that isn’t present?

I think one of the reasons I write short poems a lot is because I actually am really interested in silence. To me, the perfect poem would just be silence. Nothing. But just getting close to that.

There are poets who I feel like do that kind of thing. Alejandra Pizarnik is a poet that writes really short poems, and she seems to be pretty fascinated with death in her work. But I feel like her poems make the silence louder. And Joyce Mansour, she’s another one who, there’s kind of a witchiness there.

I love a witchiness in poems. I feel like that’s definitely in the definition of a poem, some kind of a magical quality.

I love what you said about the perfect poem being silence. I feel like that’s so true. True silence is so hard to achieve in your mind, and there are certain times— usually when I’m in the woods hiking—where I manage to not have anything in my space, and I’m only tuned into, like, the atmosphere. And there’s nothing like it. It’s really magical.

Yeah! Anne Carson has this book called Short Talks that I just read. I don’t remember what the title of it is—it’s some French thing that just won’t stick in my brain—but the poem, or the short talk, is something like “I thought of you all through the night. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.”¹

*Katrina looks at Harris, mouth agape and speechless*

Yes. And I feel like that phrasing, “someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels,” is... I don’t know.

I’d tattoo it on my chest.

I know! You know a poem when you see it. [Laughs]

Yes, exactly. How do you know when a poem is good?

You just know. It just hits you in a certain way, or is evocative of something. I mean poetry is ancient, and I would imagine probably ever since language has existed there’s been this impulse to do this kind of bending of it. And something happens, like you can just feel it.

Who are some other like writers or creatives that you’re feeling really excited by right now?

Honestly, I’m very excited by everyone that’s in FTP. It’s me, Megan Freshley, Megan Martin, Charles Gabel, Cathy Wagner, Brett Price, Mark Mendoza, Yvette Nepper, and Patricia Murphy. It’s been really fun just getting to read their work. The most recent poem that I’m working on, I feel like was kind of subconsciously inspired by Yvette’s work. There's a line in there that I wrote that I’m like, this sounds like one of her lines.

But other than that, I often revisit Elaine Kahn’s writing. She has a book that I love called Women in Public, and I feel like it’s that kind of combination of humor, but, like, conjuring the silence also that I love. And like I said earlier, Joyce Mansour, Alejandra Pizarnik, Anne Carson, Rene Ricard. I recently read his book called God with Revolver that I really like.

How did you meet the people at FTP?

Well, Brett and Megan Martin were my professors at the Art Academy, so that’s how I met them. And everybody else I met just through poetry events and stuff here in town. They’re all local people. Megan Martin was the one who sent out an email to all of us just saying ideas are forming of this collective.

Hopefully we’ll publish more things after my chapbook. We’re not calling it a press, because we’re not trying to do exactly that. But publishing the work of the people in it, and then hopefully other people’s work, will be something that we do. And I would love to have FTP events, too.

I feel like you’re so good at creating community around poetry.

Thanks! When I started domestic water, I was just trying to rile up the community that was already there. Because when I moved to Cincinnati in 2015 I quickly found out about Chase Public and what Scott [Holzman] was doing.² And I loved going to all those readings. And people would show up!

That stopped happening around COVID times, like a lot of stuff did, and I missed going to poetry readings honestly. So I started Domestic Water.

What advice do you have for someone that feels like they are missing that in their community?

I have no prior experience hosting events or anything like that, and I don’t make any money off of it or anything. I just do it to get the community together. But what I did is I went into Conveyor Belt Books and chatted up Brandon, the owner, and I asked him, would you ever want to have events here? And he said yes. So that’s kind of step one—finding a place where you can facilitate that.

Otherwise, part of my goal of having the reading series was to find out about who is here writing that I don’t know about. Because I have my bubble, and I love my bubble, but I want to get outside of it too. So that’s part of the goal as well. And I think that that has happened. I mean, it’s a small community, but I would just say, talk to people, and just make it happen.

Without further ado, five poems collected by Harris Wheeler.

1. Little dead fly

This little fly carcass I found on my vanity in my bedroom. The poet Chelsea Tadeyeske has a poem in her chapbook Island Weather called “Mercy” where she describes dried out tiny insect bodies that become part of the home as heroic, and I love that.

2. Tender Buttons erased

This is a sculpture I made a few years ago, in response to and out of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. It is an attempt to translate language into object, but you could also call it an erasure poem.

3. Silent sign

This is a sign I saw on a median in Florida. I find it peaceful when a sign has no language.

4. This stump with a face

5. This dreamy structure

This little house (or is it a barn?) they show you at the eye doctor when they are about to blow air into your eye. I have always thought it was beautiful, it feels like a dreamlike place that I wish I could go to.

1. The exact quote is “Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.”

2. The late Chase Public was “a collaborative space for art and assembly.” They hosted readings, response projects, writing workshops accompanied by drone music, and more. It was cool. Everyone misses it.