Matthea Harvey Quotes - Page 2

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Language Writing

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

Dream, Writing, Thinking

"'All of these things are poetry.'". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. August 21, 2014.

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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

Thinking, Hands, Creating

"All of These Things Are Poetry". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, believermagblog.wordpress.com. August 21, 2014.

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

Matthea Harvey

Believe, Writing, Why Not

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

School, Clouds, Eight

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Artist, Novelists, Bells

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

People, Want, Natural

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Book, Trying, Want

Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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

Matthea Harvey

Thinking, Enough Time, Certain

Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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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

Writing, Ideas, People

"'All of these things are poetry.'". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. August 21, 2014.

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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

Writing, Thinking, Pants

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Thinking, Ideas, Mixing

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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One of my favorite titles of an art piece is "Première Communion de Jeunes Filles Chlorotiques Par Un Temps De Neige" or "First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather" by Alphonse Allais. It's essentially a joke of a title, since the accompanying image is a simple white square.

Matthea Harvey

Girl, Art, Simple

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Book, Writing, Different

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Writing, Sadness, Games

"'All of these things are poetry.'". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. August 21, 2014.

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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

Rain, Eye, Simple

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

Matthea Harvey

Dream, Reality, Everyday

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Writing, Thinking, Ideas

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Notebook, Years, Voice

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Skins, Patterns, Disease

"'All of these things are poetry.'". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. August 21, 2014.

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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

Sheep, Virginia, Voice

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Photography, Class, Trying

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Sheep, Wool, Would Be

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Narrative, Boundaries, Structure

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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

Matthea Harvey

Father, People, Different

Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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

Writing, Animal, Ice

Interview with Wendy Vardaman, poems.com. 2010.

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Latest quotes from interviews

"In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I've written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called "The Straightforward Mermaid" which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in "d" or "t," which led to "The Deadbeat Mermaid," "The Morbid Mermaid" and so forth . . ."

- Matthea Harvey,

www.raintaxi.com, added Dec 23, 2017

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Matthea Harvey

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Born: September 3, 1973
Occupation: Poet
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