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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

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

More quotes by Matthea Harvey

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.
Matthea Harvey
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Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
Matthea Harvey
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I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
Matthea Harvey
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.
Matthea Harvey
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Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
Matthea Harvey
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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
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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
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It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.
Matthea Harvey