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

Matthea Harvey Quotes

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

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

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

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

Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off.

— Matthea Harvey

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

I guess I’m a bit of a projector – my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.

— Matthea Harvey

I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it.

— Matthea Harvey

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

I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

— Matthea Harvey

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

— Matthea Harvey

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

Romance

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

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

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

— Matthea Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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