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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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Matthea Harvey
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: September 3
Poet
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Tricky
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More quotes by 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 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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Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all 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
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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
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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 guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.
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 let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
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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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
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Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
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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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'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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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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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