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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
Impulses
Poems
Prose
Impulse
Narrative
Take
Embroidering

More quotes by 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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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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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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To be a poet you have to experiment.
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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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 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 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 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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Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
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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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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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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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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Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.
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 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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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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Read widely (in and outside of your own genre), keep a notebook with you at all times. Do something that scares you every now and then. Try to locate your own frequency, knowing that one year your voice is on AM 532 and the next it's on FM 92.8.
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