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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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Matthea Harvey
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: September 3
Poet
Writer
FRG
Many
Poems
Trying
Failed
Always
Admit
Time
Later
Since
Slipped
Though
Publish
Tell
Failures
Book
Poetic

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
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I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
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To be a poet you have to experiment.
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.
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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