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

Categorized in : Soldier Borders India And Pakistan

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 games writing

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

Matthea Harvey

poetic excited writing

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

eye simple rain

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

cake ice party

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

Matthea Harvey

inanimate-objects tendencies quality

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

breathing memories children

There isn't a grand plan at work in the progression of the books with respect to the line. I do want the books to be different from each other, certainly, but I'm more aware of that on the level of theme or structure. I can tell when I'm writing the last of a particular type of poem because the writing is too easy and I start to feel queasy.

Matthea Harvey

different writing book

If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

Matthea Harvey

wool would-be sheep

I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).

Matthea Harvey

writing ideas thinking

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

Matthea Harvey

carnivals carnival-rides

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

virginia voice sheep

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

Matthea Harvey

labels fashion poetry-is

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

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

notebook voice years

I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

Matthea Harvey

structure narrative boundaries

To be a poet you have to experiment.

Matthea Harvey

experiments poet

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

Matthea Harvey

keep-learning teaching way

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

Matthea Harvey

prove particular interesting

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

asking answers giving

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

photography class trying