Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Matthea Harvey
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: September 3
Poet
Writer
FRG
Language
Subtracting
Process
Smaller
Writing
Poem
Always
Field
Available
Fields
Choose
Start

More quotes by Matthea Harvey

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
Matthea Harvey
Image
People confess can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?
Matthea Harvey
Image
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
Image
I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
Matthea Harvey
Image
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
Image
To be a poet you have to experiment.
Matthea Harvey
Image
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
Image
I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.
Matthea Harvey
Image
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
Image
I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?
Matthea Harvey
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.
Matthea Harvey
Image
In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.
Matthea Harvey
Image
Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
Matthea Harvey
Image
Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.
Matthea Harvey