43 Quotes by Matthea Harvey

Don’t fret, dreamy spinning oneswith water falling from your faces.It’s us you’re waiting for and we’re coming.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

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.

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.

What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable – people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

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.

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.

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

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.