Quote

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.

Matthea Harvey

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Matthea Harvey
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: September 3
Poet
Writer
FRG
Still
Rhyme
Writing
Abandoned
Mostly
Huge
Process
Ends
Stills
Part
Wordplay

More quotes by Matthea Harvey

Image
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
Image
I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
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
Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
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
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
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
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
Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
Matthea Harvey
Image
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
Image
I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?
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 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
Image
I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
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
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
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
Image
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
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