Matthea Harvey famous quotes

I think poetry involves heightened noticing or imagining as well as creating a certain made shape. On the other hand, that shape can be made just by pointing at something and saying, "That's a poem."
-- Matthea Harvey

#Thinking #Hands #Creating

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

#Skins #Disease #Patterns

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

#Writing #Fields #Language

Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Sadness #Writing #Games

A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Writing #Ideas #People

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

#Dream #Writing #Thinking

S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Rain #Eye #Winning

Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Writing #Poetic #Excited

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Thinking #Needs #Language

Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each evening around six o' clock, the soldiers on each side do these amazing high-stepping peacock march-offs (like a dance-off). The displays are almost identical on each side and thousands gather to watch them. Though they're patrolling along their separate borders, what comes across is how similar they are.
-- Matthea Harvey

#India And Pakistan #Soldier #Borders

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Thinking #Records #Helping

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Language #Embedded #Instruction

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

#Giving #Asking #Answers

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Interesting #Prove #Particular

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Teaching #Way #Keep Learning

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Lines #Concrete #Visuals

I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days - the worse ones - we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Children #Memories #Breathing

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Blue #Long #Suitcases

To be a poet you have to experiment.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Poet #Experiments

Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Writing #Starting Out #Form

I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Quality #Inanimate Objects #Tendencies

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

#Party #Ice #Cake

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Fashion #Labels #Poetry Is

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

#Writing #Abandoned #Ends

It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Vision #Artistic #Artwork

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Way #Humans

I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Different #Emotion #Situation

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Voice #Romance #Way

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.
-- Matthea Harvey

#Art #Differences #Fiction