Matthea Harvey Quotes

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.

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

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

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

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

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

I thought that perhaps if the sky was truly free of clouds and any other distractions (birds, kites, skywriting), we could see if there was something else out there. I wasn't really raised in any religion (in England I attended an Anglican school and went to a Methodist church, but I left that all behind at the age of eight when we moved to the U.S.), but like most people, I sometimes wonder if there's anything or anyone out there.

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

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.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I've written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called "The Straightforward Mermaid" which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in "d" or "t," which led to "The Deadbeat Mermaid," "The Morbid Mermaid" and so forth . . .

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

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

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