Poet Will Harris: ‘The trait I find most irritating in others? An excessive love of fascism’

What is your earliest memory?
This question is particularly stressful because I feel like the implied question is “where do you begin?” If I try to think back to early childhood, everything goes blank. But I remember playing with those cushioned knee rests on church pews, licking bourbon biscuits, getting scared at a steam fair and being obsessed with Tubby Custard.

Who was or still is your mentor?
I’ve always struggled with mentors. I used to cycle through people who I’d project too much on to, hoping they could solve my problems. But I didn’t know what my problems were, and my relationship to writing only improved when I stopped looking up and elsewhere and started sharing work with the friends around me.

How fit are you?
My dad kept fit by working. He had an antiques stall in Portobello market and his job involved carrying stuff around. He instilled this idea, which I don’t necessarily agree with, that “working out” is bourgeois, an admission that you don’t really work. I have a job in extra-care homes dancing around, carrying tea and biscuits, which keeps me not totally unfit.

Tell me about an animal you have loved.
I looked after a skinny black cat called Puss during the first lockdown. She would purr like a toy tractor and curl up on my chest for warmth while I watched bad films, and she never once judged me.

Risk or caution, which has defined your life more?
I don’t relate strongly to either. I’ve always lived in the same city, and for long stretches I was terrified of leaving London, but that wasn’t because I was overcautious. It was because I was unhappy. I don’t know if it would’ve helped to risk more.

What trait do you find most irritating in others?
An excessive love of fascism.

What trait do you find most irritating in yourself?
Indirectness.

What drives you on?
I embarrass easily. I’m driven by the (embarrassing) urge to expose something in myself that I feel like others can already see, and then to add an extra clause correcting or contradicting what I meant, and then another. I’m always trying to finish the same sentence.

Do you believe in an afterlife?
I believe in the possibility, but only on Earth.

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
We live under an economic system that reproduces suffering and curtails its expression, sentimentalising certain forms of suffering and making others invisible. I guess that’s puzzling. Every day we give our passive (and active) consent to a state empowered to make violence a necessary precondition of its continuing being.

Name your favourite river.
The cardiovascular river system, which ferries nutrients and oxygen to the cells of my favourite people.

What would you have done differently?
Sometimes I think it would’ve been nice to speak multiple languages, to have spent more time with my family as a child, to have taught myself how to make Tubby Custard. But isn’t the idea of free will — conceived as a series of individual, as opposed to collective, choices — just a yo-yo that’ll hit you in the face every time you stop to think about it?

‘Brother Poem’ by Will Harris is published by Granta

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