Matthea Harvey Quotes & Sayings

Teaching is a great way to keep learning. — Matthea Harvey

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

I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it. — Matthea Harvey

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion. — Matthea Harvey

Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off. — Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

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

When I get interested in a new topic I teach a class on it. There's a graduate seminar I teach in which the students and I try to expand the terminology we use to talk about poetry as well as expand our notion of what makes a poem - we read source texts on architecture, dance, photography, film and the graphic novel. — Matthea Harvey

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

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual. — Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities. — Matthea Harvey

If I begin a poem, "I am a donkey," reason kicks in and says, "She is taking on the persona of a donkey." But if I write, "I have taken so many drugs I can't see my feet," the tendency is to take that as a confession on the part of the poet. Maybe that doesn't matter. I'd almost prefer for it to be the other way round. — Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

There isn't a grand plan at work in the progression of the books with respect to the line. I do want the books to be different from each other, certainly, but I'm more aware of that on the level of theme or structure. I can tell when I'm writing the last of a particular type of poem because the writing is too easy and I start to feel queasy. — Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

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

I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems. — Matthea Harvey

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are. — Matthea Harvey

Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each evening around six o' clock, the soldiers on each side do these amazing high-stepping peacock march-offs (like a dance-off). The displays are almost identical on each side and thousands gather to watch them. Though they're patrolling along their separate borders, what comes across is how similar they are. — Matthea Harvey

S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty. — Matthea Harvey

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language. — Matthea Harvey

I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative? — Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

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

I thought that perhaps if the sky was truly free of clouds and any other distractions (birds, kites, skywriting), we could see if there was something else out there. I wasn't really raised in any religion (in England I attended an Anglican school and went to a Methodist church, but I left that all behind at the age of eight when we moved to the U.S.), but like most people, I sometimes wonder if there's anything or anyone out there. — Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal. — Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow. — Matthea Harvey

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

To be a poet you have to experiment. — Matthea Harvey

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride. — Matthea Harvey

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