Matthea Harvey Quotes

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.

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

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

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

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

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

To be a poet you have to experiment.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.