Below are 5 poems from my manuscript Har___d_Sent_____, a collection of seventy-two erasure poems which make use of "The Harvard Sentences" as a source text. The Harvard Sentences are a set of 72 lists of phonetically balanced sentences developed in the 1960s for experimentation and optimization in sound, voice, and hearing technologies. While the sentences themselves, which were meant to merely pass as meaningful text, are unrelated, I find the lists are unexpectedly delightful and mysterious and capacious.

With this work, I was interested in excavating narrative and meaning in the sentence lists, imagining partial transmissions, and exploring the sonic energies of these sentences, all the while considering how language both influences and is shaped by the technologies we use for communication and hearing. The pieces themselves seek to draw attention to the transmissionness of the lists and evoke possible cadences, bitrates, and channels available within them.

~ Patrick Williams

List 5

                      the state in       early days
               was torn          on
Sickness
                                          in the hot sun
The lazy                        cool
Lift the                 stone over
                            seven books at once
                               and plunge in
The                 gang left the
          wire                       inside

List 6

       frosty air
                                 failed to
                  lead  to                sums
                     a flop from the very start
A saw is a tool
                 moved on
                   soldiers          the next hill
           of sugar makes  
         a rosebush         the
         lost         live    in        a        storm

List 9

The          attacked
See the        glaring     the scared  
         are more than two  
                            wide and too droopy
The lawyer  
                curled around the fence
                        large  
Men strive but  
Always  
      lay prone

List 14

A cramp is  
             the same phrase thirty times
         the           rose              leaves
Two plus                              ten
        glow deep            in the eye  of
          your problems         wise
                                    friend      cherish
          and
       frown when events take  
            a strong                  smoky taste

List 16

      empty flask  
                                  track mark
He broke a new shoelace  
                                     for the
        urge                      stories
                have all been
                                                    lost
We tried to replace the     i      but failed
She        wed                 at
          a               red          light

---

Patrick Williams is a poet and academic librarian living in Central New York. His recent work appears in publications including Vinyl Poetry, Nine Mile Magazine, Posit, and Bennington Review. His chapbook Hygiene in Reading (Publishing Genius, 2016) was awarded the 2015 Chris Toll Memorial Prize. He edits Really System, a journal of poetry and extensible poetics and is the hands behind typewriter.city. Find him at patrickwilliamsintext.com and on Twitter @activitystory.