Matthea Harvey Quotes

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

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.

I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.

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

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

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.

I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?

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

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

If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire
So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre.

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

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

I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.

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.

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

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

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