Matthea Harvey Quotes

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.

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.

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

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

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

To be a poet you have to experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

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

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.