Matthea Harvey Quotes

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.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

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.

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

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.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

To be a poet you have to experiment.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

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

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.

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.