I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual. Matthea Harvey More Quotes by Matthea Harvey More Quotes From Matthea Harvey I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it. Matthea Harvey enough-time certain thinking 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 people ideas It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision. Matthea Harvey artwork artistic vision I guess I'm a bit of a projector - my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations. Matthea Harvey situation emotion different 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 creating hands thinking I am charmed by concrete poetry (but it's very hard to do well, I think) and in general by the idea of mixing the visual and the textual. Matthea Harvey mixing ideas thinking I read a lot of graphic novels - some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French. Matthea Harvey bells novelists artist I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative? Matthea Harvey why-not writing believe When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it's a lineated or prose poem, but I don't think I can explain how. It's like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants. Matthea Harvey pants writing thinking 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 language needs thinking I thought that perhaps if the sky was truly free of clouds and any other distractions (birds, kites, skywriting), we could see if there was something else out there. I wasn't really raised in any religion (in England I attended an Anglican school and went to a Methodist church, but I left that all behind at the age of eight when we moved to the U.S.), but like most people, I sometimes wonder if there's anything or anyone out there. Matthea Harvey eight clouds school Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language. Matthea Harvey embedded language instruction 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 borders soldier 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 ocean flower spring 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 taken feet writing 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 records helping thinking I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality. Matthea Harvey everyday dream reality I grew up spending time at my grandmother's farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle. Matthea Harvey west-germany grandmother two 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 borders political talking 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 tricky certain poet
