Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Matthea Harvey

Image
It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.
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
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
Image
Some of my favorite poems are confessional poems written in the voices of aliens (Southbound on the Freeway by May Swenson and Report from the Surface by Anthony McCann), sheep (Snow Line by John Berryman) or a yak (The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia by Oni Buchanan).
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 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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Image
Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
Matthea Harvey
Image
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
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 guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.
Matthea Harvey
Image
To be a poet you have to experiment.
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 am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.
Matthea Harvey