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8/21/2008
Interview with Matthea Harvey
by Amber Pearson
Q: Many of the characters that inhabit Modern Life seem to have a fragmentary loneliness to them, such as the halved catgoat that ignores its other half in favor of itself, the person whose eyes are stolen, or the person who feels closest to a potato plant. Even omniscience doesn’t seem to relieve this condition. How does this idea of alienation, or perhaps alienation from one’s own self, play into your work?
A: This is where I tell you that I’m two people, Mat and Thea and we’re always at war, or that I’m actually an alien. Honestly, I think the poems answer that better than I could. It’s very hard to have that kind of perspective on oneself. It’s like asking a chocolate nestled in a chocolate box what it thinks about its position in the box. The chocolate can’t see beyond its own little indentation… Still, I’ll give it a whirl. The reason that I’m attracted to centaurs and catgoats, is that their dividedness is physically apparent. We humans keep our contradictions more hidden. If there were an alienation x-ray, I imagine we’d all be criss-crossed with dividing lines.
Q: You move with an unusual fluidity between prose poems, more traditionally lineated works, long series poems, and even one-line, almost call-and-response poems within this book. As you work on any given poem or idea, how do you decide what the appropriate format will be? Over time do you find yourself moving more strongly towards any one direction?
A: Well, I’m very fond of the unsettling little form of the prose poem. I think since I’ve started writing them, I’ve felt a bigger need to earn line breaks. Generally, I can tell within minutes of starting a poem whether it’s going to be in lines or in a prose block. It’s intuitive—almost a physical sensation. And the one-line poems are a new development—those are fun because you can write and rewrite them in your head.
Q: I’m utterly entranced by Robo-Boy; despite his metallic outlook, he is sympathetic, easy to connect to, and a little heartbreaking. Where did Robo-Boy come from, and what is it like to write him?
A: I’ve always loved robots and for a long time I didn’t let myself write about them. They were too precious. I don’t know what changed. I wrote the first poem in this series, “Wac-A Mole Realism,” and then the rest just kept coming. I have a lot of affection and pity for him, trapped as he is between being a robot and a human. It occurs to me that for that affection to flower I had to write about him in the third person, not the first.
Q: The centaur who can’t eat without a fight, Dinna’ Pig, the living figureheads, and the empty pets are all fantastic characters who could easily find homes in fairy tales as well as your poems. What role do these characters play for you?
A: I love fairy tales, so I’m glad to think that these characters could live there in that realm, where they could have entirely different narrative experiences… The figureheads leave a trail of anchors, like breadcrumbs, across the ocean floor. The empty pets wear red capelets and feast on wolves… I don’t know how I would characterize the difference between those prose poems and fairytales—possibly there isn’t one. I think I invent these creatures (and I don’t sit down and think “Time to create a character,” they usually just appear...) in order to have new experiences, new screens to project onto.
Q: The sequences “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” are at once playful and fearful, hopeful and desperate, moving from “we” to “I” only to get lost in the desert. In your essay “Don Dada on the Down Low Getting Godly in His Game: Between and Beyond Play and Prayer in the Abecedarius” you say of these poems, “I was stuck on a highway between the towns of Future and Terror and I could explore the countryside in between the two. Beyond them, the road ended.” What have you learned while writing that road? Is the road’s end created in these poems final, or can you see a new place to go?
A: By writing those twenty-one poems (when I expected to write one) I learned the full extent of my fear and anger and bewilderment post 9/11. At the same time, I had this almost magical or automatic experience of creating another world and getting to know its inhabitants. I also rediscovered the delight of working in a series. I have no idea where to go next—right now my poems are all over the place. I don’t think the next book will feel like a continuation of the themes in Modern Life. I imagine it will be something entirely different.
Q: “Implications for Modern Life” seems to contain many of the tensions in this book, such as power paired with overwhelming helplessness. What is this poem’s role in the larger book, and why call the collection Modern Life?
A: That poem came about because of a little detail from a news story on NPR—they were reporting that there were microscopic particles of barbeque floating above Houston (where I was just about to go and teach for a semester). That night I had a dream about ham flowers and that’s where the poem started. I think of “Implications for Modern Life” as a little fable about creation and responsibility—the speaker in it wants a protective or caretaking role with respect to the world (wants to protect the calves, bring the horse back to life) but has to also acknowledge herself as the author of some of the ugliness in the world (“I made the ham flowers.”) Holding those seemingly contradictory feelings at once is, I suppose, a metaphor for the entire collection. I called the book Modern Life because I really wanted a giant neutral title—one that wouldn’t direct the reader too much.
These questions can be answered in a word, a phrase, or a sentence:
1. Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.
Lewis Trondheim.
2. What kind of child were you?
I was always reading—hiding in a closet or up a tree, reading.
3. What's your relationship with rejection like?
The usual, I think.
4. What book do you feel you suffered for the most? How?
I probably ordered the poems in Modern Life fifteen times, over a six-month period. Finding the final order was pretty difficult. But I do enjoy the ordering process, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it suffering.
5. What was the greatest surprise for you in writing these recent pages?
Each time I’m given interview questions I have to battle through a wall of resistance—I don’t particularly like talking about myself or my process.
6. Do you have a writerly habit you'd like to break?
I have a readerly habit I’d like to break. I buy way too many books and as a result there are book skyscrapers all over my office.
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Copyright © 2009 The Southeast Review
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