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I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

Matthea Harvey

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Matthea Harvey
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: September 3
Poet
Writer
FRG
Prose
Impulse
Narrative
Take
Embroidering
Impulses
Poems

More quotes by 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 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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Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
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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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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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 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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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 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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To be a poet you have to experiment.
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 guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.
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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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
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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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I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
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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Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.
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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It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.
Matthea Harvey