Top 40 Matthea Harvey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Teaching is a great way to keep learning.”

— Matthea Harvey

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2. “I guess I’m a bit of a projector – my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.”

— Matthea Harvey

3. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

4. “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

5. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Matthea Harvey

7. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

8. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

9. “I read a lot of graphic novels – some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.”

— Matthea Harvey

10. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

11. “I’m interested in concrete poems – anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.”

— Matthea Harvey

12. “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

13. “Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.”

— Matthea Harvey

14. “Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.”

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Matthea Harvey

16. “Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off.”

— Matthea Harvey

17. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

Featured in: Romance Quotes

18. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

19. “We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.”

— Matthea Harvey

20. “Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.”

— Matthea Harvey

21. “I suppose it’s useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an “I,” but it’s a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.”

— Matthea Harvey

22. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Matthea Harvey

27. “I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.”

— Matthea Harvey

28. “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

29. “I’m pretty lenient with myself about time – if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It’s all part of the same thing for me.”

— Matthea Harvey

30. “Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.”

— Matthea Harvey

31. “Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.”

— Matthea Harvey

32. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

33. “I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative – why not a nyric or a larrative?”

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Matthea Harvey

35. “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

36. “To be a poet you have to experiment.”

— Matthea Harvey

37. “I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.”

— Matthea Harvey

38. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey

42. “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.”

— Matthea Harvey