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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
Choose
Start
Language
Subtracting
Process
Smaller
Writing
Poem
Always
Field
Available
Fields

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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 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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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 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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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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Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
Matthea Harvey
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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
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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
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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
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I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.
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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Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
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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I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
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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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
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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