Matthea Harvey Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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."”
-- Matthea Harvey -
“I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem.”
-- Matthea Harvey -
“Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.”
-- Matthea Harvey -
“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.”
-- Matthea Harvey -
“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.”
-- Matthea Harvey -
“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.”
-- Matthea Harvey -
“S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty.”
-- Matthea Harvey -
“Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.”
-- Matthea Harvey
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