321 on Matthea Harvey

Arta Seyedian
11/02/2011
Engh 396

Three things I learned

1.     Matthea Harvey was born in Germany and spent her childhood in the UK before moving to America at the age of 8. She had both an American accent and an English accent, one she used in public and one she used around the house, until she moved out and started consistently using her American accent.

2.     Her collection of poetry was interesting, because it was the first time I've heard of anyone using a particular set boundary as inspiration for writing. For example, she read to the audience a series of poems that were based off of "What if 1 thing didn't exist?" e.g rain and arrows. She also used headlines for world news as a spring board for her poetry, which I found to be a pretty creative way to go about writing.

3.     Matthea Harvey wrote a series of poems called "The Terror of Future" and "The Future of Terror" if I recall correctly, and she employed a style of poetry where she would write a poem using all of the words between ‘Future’ and ‘Terror’.

Two things that need to be clarified

1.  I’d like to know what the name of this style of writing is – she mentioned it briefly, but despite my tremendous capacity for paying attention, I somehow missed it.
2. I want to know why she’s chosen to distance herself from her English heritage. She hints at it in her poem “Our American Husbands” and she talked about how she has lost her British accent. Why is that?

One question I have

1. 1.     How did she start out doing performance poetry and how did she come to the conclusion that that is what she wants to do?