Matthea Harvey Quotes

#1. I like to photograph miniature constructed scenes - I'll buy a very sad cake decoration like a plastic computer for a dreary office birthday party and construct a wildly colorful scene to put on its screen, or do a series of dollhouse chairs frozen in ice cubes.

Matthea Harvey

#2. If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

Matthea Harvey

#3. Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.

Matthea Harvey

#4. I grew up spending time at my grandmother's farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle.

Matthea Harvey

#5. I am charmed by concrete poetry (but it's very hard to do well, I think) and in general by the idea of mixing the visual and the textual.

Matthea Harvey

#6. I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

Matthea Harvey

#7. In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.

Matthea Harvey

#8. Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

Matthea Harvey

#9. I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days - the worse ones - we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.

Matthea Harvey

#10. I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

Matthea Harvey

#11. I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.

Matthea Harvey

#12. As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.

Matthea Harvey

#13. When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

Matthea Harvey

#14. Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

Matthea Harvey

#15. We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

Matthea Harvey

#16. To be a poet you have to experiment.

Matthea Harvey

#17. Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.

Matthea Harvey

#18. People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"

Matthea Harvey

#19. I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.

Matthea Harvey

#20. I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?

Matthea Harvey

#21. I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem.

Matthea Harvey

#22. Whether you're talking about political borders or aesthetic divisions (and clearly, the political ones have much more tragic consequences), it seems like once they are created, we want to patrol them, enforce them.

Matthea Harvey

#23. "Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.

Matthea Harvey

#24. I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

Matthea Harvey

#25. It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.

Matthea Harvey

#26. Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Matthea Harvey

#27. I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it.

Matthea Harvey

#28. I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It's limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric "I" stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem.

Matthea Harvey

#29. If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire
So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them

Matthea Harvey

#30. Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

Matthea Harvey

#31. I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

#32. A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address.

Matthea Harvey

#33. What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

Matthea Harvey

#34. I'm pretty lenient with myself about time - if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It's all part of the same thing for me.

Matthea Harvey

#35. I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.

Matthea Harvey

#36. I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can't always tell they're failures until later ... or I don't want to admit that they are.

Matthea Harvey

#37. Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click.

Matthea Harvey

#38. I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.

Matthea Harvey

#39. When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it's a lineated or prose poem, but I don't think I can explain how. It's like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants.

Matthea Harvey

#40. I don't think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans.

Matthea Harvey

#41. I think poetry involves heightened noticing or imagining as well as creating a certain made shape. On the other hand, that shape can be made just by pointing at something and saying, "That's a poem."

Matthea Harvey

#42. I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).

Matthea Harvey

#43. I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

Matthea Harvey

#44. Read widely (in and outside of your own genre), keep a notebook with you at all times. Do something that scares you every now and then. Try to locate your own frequency, knowing that one year your voice is on AM 532 and the next it's on FM 92.8.

Matthea Harvey

#45. I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre.

Matthea Harvey

#46. Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

Matthea Harvey

#47. Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

Matthea Harvey

#48. I think there are people who do write regionally, because that's their subject matter - the way the sunset looks over a strip mall, memories of flirting at the ice rink, waking up to a deer at the window ... Up to now, that hasn't been mine.

Matthea Harvey

#49. I read a lot of graphic novels - some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.

Matthea Harvey

#50. Some of my favorite poems are "confessional" poems written in the voices of aliens ("Southbound on the Freeway" by May Swenson" and "Report from the Surface" by Anthony McCann), sheep ("Snow Line" by John Berryman) or a yak ("The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia" by Oni Buchanan).

Matthea Harvey

#51. Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off.

Matthea Harvey

#52. I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

Matthea Harvey

#53. Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.

Matthea Harvey

#54. I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.

Matthea Harvey