43 Quotes by Matthea Harvey

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

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

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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