{"id":76203,"date":"2014-09-02T16:22:30","date_gmt":"2014-09-02T20:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=76203"},"modified":"2014-09-02T17:45:16","modified_gmt":"2014-09-02T21:45:16","slug":"mermaid-convention-an-interview-with-matthea-harvey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/02\/mermaid-convention-an-interview-with-matthea-harvey\/","title":{"rendered":"Mermaid Convention: An Interview with Matthea Harvey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Harvey,<\/a>

Matthea Harvey. Photo courtesy of Graywolf Press<\/p><\/div>\n

Matthea Harvey\u2019s whimsy almost defies the scope of the English language. She seems to sculpt out of molten glass the topics and the treatments in her poems, optimistic fairy tales for a universe where everything\u2019s deformed, or maybe deformed fairies in a universe where everything\u2019s optimistic. It\u2019s easy to feel almost at home among her poems, which are sometimes uncanny in the way that scary truths are uncanny, sometimes uncanny like the Uncanny X-Men, and sometimes uncanny in that their delightful artifice should, but can\u2019t, be preserved and canned.<\/em><\/p>\n

Harvey teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn; she grew up in England and Wisconsin. You may have read her beautifully titled first volume, <\/em>Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (2000); or <\/em>Modern Life (2007), where alliterative, associative, alphabetical poems jostle against prose parables that science-fiction readers would call \u201cslipstream\u201d; or <\/em>Of Lamb (2011), Harvey\u2019s collaboration with the visual artist Amy Jean Porter, in which an erased biography of Charles and Mary Lamb sends Mary and Her Lamb through\u2014a lost garden? A forest of previous children\u2019s books? A dreamland? Or you might have seen one of her other collaborations\u2014with composers, with animators\u2014or one of her own photographs. Still, you won\u2019t be ready for <\/em>If The Tabloids Are True Then What Are You?<\/a>, her new collection of poems and fables, in verse and prose, about mermaids, ice cubes, erasures, talking animals, and early telephones, with a set of images\u2014including photographs of Harvey\u2019s sculptures\u2014inseparable from them. As NPR put it earlier this year, \u201c<\/em>Harvey is a genius of the unusual, and of the dark underbelly of the adorable.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

You can read more about her here<\/a> and especially here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Some of the poems have obvious sources in fables\u2014\u201cNo-Hands has hands,\u201d or \u201cthe animals did begin to glow.\u201d Is there a particular fable or fairy-tale compilation that served as your best source? Aesop, the Grimms, La Fontaine, Kafka, Andrew Lang?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote both of those poems without knowing that there were fables about either one. Myths and fairy tales are mysterious that way\u2014we\u2019re all shoots sprouting from one underground narrative fungus. Still, I know that stories by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Heinrich Hoffmann\u2019s Der Struwwelpeter<\/em> are all tumbling around in the pebble polisher of my unconscious. I\u2019m currently reading Phillip Pullman\u2019s Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm<\/em>, in which I found a new favorite, \u201cThe Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage.\u201d This insanity happens in it: \u201cThe sausage stayed by the pot most of the time, keeping an eye on the vegetables, and from time to time he\u2019d slither through the water to give it a bit of flavoring. If it needed seasoning, he\u2019d swim more slowly.\u201d Imagine flavoring a soup with yourself!<\/p>\n

This collection is full of mermaids. Why mermaids?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Primarily because the phrase \u201cstraightforward mermaid\u201d appeared in my head and wouldn\u2019t leave me alone. But why mermaids in general? Because they\u2019re sex objects who can\u2019t have sex. Because there\u2019s a whole school of gender issues swimming around them. Because we live among so many unspoken boundaries that sometimes it\u2019s a relief to have such an explicit one. Because we all know the feeling of being divided and not belonging. Because we don\u2019t acknowledge our animal selves enough. <\/p>\n

Did you follow any of the recent fiction or\u00a0nonfiction about mermaids\u2014the film Sunshine State<\/em>, the Times<\/em> magazine piece on people who imitate mermaids, Liz Kessler\u2019s middle-grade novels, Michelle Tea\u2019s Mermaid in\u00a0Chelsea Creek<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My first encounter with a mermaid in a contemporary short story was Aimee Bender\u2019s \u201cDrunken Mimi\u201d from The Girl in\u00a0the Flammable Skirt<\/em>. Her mermaid is in high school, hiding her tail with long skirts, and has hair-tendrils that can drink. Once I was writing about mermaids, I started to see them everywhere. At first I thought this was just because I was newly interested in them, but they really just are everywhere. It\u2019s strange to be part of a trend accidentally.<\/p>\n

In Dorothy Dinnerstein\u2019s wonderful book of seventies feminism, The Mermaid and the Minotaur<\/em>, mermaids are women who have been made to be (or who have had to teach themselves to be) feminine. Helpless, exotic, relatively immobile in the adult world, admired for looks\u2014how dangerous is that archetype for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s horribly limiting. When I went to the otherwise quite wonderful Mercon, a mermaid convention, it was striking to me that the mermaids in their restrictive tails were so helpless on land\u2014they had to be carried around by men. But once they were in the pool swimming around, they were strong and quite magical.<\/p>\n

What do we need to know about Antonio Meucci, who makes a cameo?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That he should get at least partial credit for inventing the telephone. He\u2019s well known in Italy and Cuba, where he lived before moving to the U.S. in 1850. His house is preserved on Staten Island because the freedom fighter Garibaldi lived with Antonio and his wife, Esterre, at one point. You should also know that he invented\u2014and sometimes patented\u2014more things than I could include in my poem. Improved firework propellant, tinned Italian meat sauce, a process for preserving corpses\u2014he lost money on that one\u2014a coffee filter, Christmas candles, and a plastic paste for making billiard balls. About Esterre, you should know that she was an accomplished seamstress who had twenty-one cats, including one called Lillina.<\/p>\n

Meucci invented the marine telephone for divers to talk with ship captains, so clarity was essential\u2014you didn\u2019t want \u201cHelp, a shark\u201d to morph into \u201cMaybe let\u2019s park?\u201d Poems are impractical telephones, prone to mishearing, distortion, but perhaps indirectly a means to the truth.<\/p>\n

Which came first, the poems appended to images, or the images appended to the poems? Or did you develop text and image together?<\/strong><\/p>\n

With \u201cIn the Glass Factory,\u201d the acts of writing the poem, listening to Philip Glass\u2019s Quartet No. 5, and taking the photographs were all intertwined. I had five inch-tall glass bottles on my window and when I got stuck on a part of the poem, I\u2019d photograph them. I have thousands of pictures of those bottles. When the wind blew the light blue bottle onto the floor and it broke, I realized that the corresponding glass girl in the poem had to disappear.<\/p>\n

I wrote the mermaid poems without any illustrations and made the mermaid silhouettes independently, not knowing they would eventually pair up. The poem that gave me the most trouble was \u201cThe Radio Animals.\u201d I tried so many different setups\u2014a silhouette of a Coke can that ended up looking like a face, photographing my radio, making chopped-up purple jello to shoot through. Ultimately it turned out that I needed a combination of silhouette and miniature for that image.<\/p>\n

Your prose poems are notably lyrical and evocative, whereas your poems in free verse, at least those in stichic free verse, go out of their way to tell stories.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The difference is entirely intuitive. I can\u2019t explain it. I just know within the first line or two whether it will be in a prose block or in lines.<\/p>\n

\"If<\/a>In poems with one clear metaphor throughout\u2014the puppet, the Treatzcart, the Phenom\u2014does the metaphor come to you first, before the language that develops it, or do you start with a phrase, or a kit of phrases?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those all started with bits of language\u2014I heard the phrase \u201cgame for anything\u201d and I got excited imagining that as an actual game. And a friend actually said to me, \u201cI\u2019m a puppet snob,\u201d which made me wonder how one would become a puppet snob, and how that snobbery would make you experience the world. The phrase becomes the lens through which I look at the world and make the poem.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Owl Other\u201d is possibly the one poem I would use to introduce If the Tabloids<\/em> to someone who had never seen your work. \u201cYou\u2019re gone too, my Owl Other\u201d may be the most traditional line in the book.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m usually not a very autobiographical writer, but \u201cMy Owl Other\u201d is an elegy for my grandmother, who died a few years ago. I called her Omi Eule, German for grandmother owl<\/em>, and she called me Matty Maus. She lived on a pig farm in Klein Zecher, a tiny town in northern Germany, with my aunt, uncle, and cousins for most of her life. I have fond memories going swimming at a lake that was on the border between East and West Germany. I found it so strange that one lake could be in two countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Owl Other\u201d had many incarnations. I revised the poem endlessly. I think it\u2019s the first one I wrote when I unknowingly started this project\u2014at one point the title was a photograph of a glass owl seeming to melt into a swimming pool inside a rearview mirror. Initially I thought all the poems would be titled with photographs inside rearview mirrors.<\/p>\n

Only when I started listing owl facts did the more personal voice of \u201cyou\u2019re gone too\u201d break in. It is a moment of unusual directness.<\/p>\n

The collection includes a Shakespearean sonnet\u2014did that come fast or slow compared to the free verse that surrounds it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of the poems come at a similar pace\u2014over days or weeks. The sonnet wasn\u2019t any different in terms of speed from the free verse pieces. Only \u201cOn Intimacy\u201d arrived in the rushed romantic way one might wish for.<\/p>\n

Do you keep multiple notebooks? Do you keep separate notebooks for verse and for visual art?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have piles of notebooks. And nothing is organized. Sometimes I\u2019ll go through and try to color code which are notes on museums, poem ideas, children\u2019s book ideas, or image ideas, but without much success. It\u2019s the same with my large collection of miniatures. I try to sort them into categories\u2014furniture, tools, food, books, animals, et cetera\u2014but I find that the random juxtapositions that occur when they\u2019re loose inspire me more.<\/p>\n

Is poetry a form of miniaturization? Do you embrace, or work against, the tendency of miniaturization to make whatever or whomever it shrinks become cute, feminized, childlike, portable, harmless?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m intrigued by miniatures\u2014I love a tiny blue cheese or a boiled egg in an eggcup as much as, if not more than, the next person, but I also think miniatures can be disarming, and can therefore slip past our defenses. After all, a blood clot can kill you just as easily as a truck. A year ago, I wrote an essay about miniatures in poetry titled with a line from Emily Dickinson, \u201cThe Rose is an Estate in Sicily,\u201d in which I talked about how miniatures also bring up the issue of control. In Russell Edson\u2019s poem \u201cCounting Sheep,\u201d about a scientist who makes a test tube full of tiny sheep, the speaker quickly moves from delighted musing to a kind of murderous impulse. \u201cHe wonders if they could be used as a substitute for rice, a sort of woolly rice \u2026 He wonders if he just shouldn\u2019t rub them into a red paste between his fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Is there a book we should read to help understand you\u2014to understand these poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fantastic Toys<\/a><\/em>, by Monika Beisner. It\u2019s a book I read over and over again as a child. It features such wonders as a heated sheep toboggan and winged jumping boots. Four years ago, I discovered the reason we had that magical book\u2014my mother had gone to elementary school with Monika. For me, it was as if she\u2019d gone to school with Marilyn Monroe and never mentioned it.<\/p>\n

Stephen Burt (sometimes Stephanie) is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, among them <\/em>Belmont (2013) and <\/em>Why I Am Not a Toddler and Other Poems by Cooper Bennett Burt (2011). Stephen is currently writing a book of essays on single contemporary poems, tentatively called <\/em>The Poem Is You.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthea Harvey\u2019s whimsy almost defies the scope of the English language. She seems to sculpt out of molten glass the topics and the treatments in her poems, optimistic fairy tales for a universe where everything\u2019s deformed, or maybe deformed fairies in a universe where everything\u2019s optimistic. It\u2019s easy to feel almost at home among her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":743,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[15155,14258,15154,7265,2778,14921,15153,100,7221,165],"class_list":["post-76203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-antonio-meucci","tag-collaboration","tag-fables","tag-fairy-tales","tag-matthea-harvey","tag-mermaids","tag-mixed-media","tag-photography","tag-poems","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Conversation with Matthea Harvey<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The poet and author on her new collection of poems and fables, \u201cIf The Tabloids Are True Then What Are You?\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/02\/mermaid-convention-an-interview-with-matthea-harvey\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mermaid Convention: An Interview with Matthea Harvey by Stephen Burt\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 2, 2014 \u2013 Matthea Harvey\u2019s whimsy almost defies the scope of the English language. 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