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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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Matthea Harvey
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: September 3
Poet
Writer
FRG
Writing
Pretty
Dramatically
Trying
Ways
Frequently
Way
Courses
Poems
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Course
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Write
Clearly
Thinking
Dream
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More quotes by 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 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 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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In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.
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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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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To be a poet you have to experiment.
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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Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
Matthea Harvey
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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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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 have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
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 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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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'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.
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 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
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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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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