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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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Matthea Harvey
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: September 3
Poet
Writer
FRG
Lyric
Lyrical
Narrative
Certainly
Write
Writing
Believe

More quotes by 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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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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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 do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
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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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 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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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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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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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.
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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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 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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Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
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 let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
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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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
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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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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