Quotes from Matthea Harvey

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 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 don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes she feels like a third gender- preferring primary colors to pastels, the radio to singing. At least she's all mermaid: never gets tired of swimming, hates the thought of socks. -from "The Straight Forward Mermaid

Return is inevitable because we need something To define ourselves against even if we know that Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too