Childhood fueled poet's imagination

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT) - Kimmasaccalottamely was likely where it began. That was the first fruit of Matthea Harvey's poetic imagination.

She was in third grade in Whitefish Bay, Wis., at the time and had been asked to write a poem or a story about "a place you would go to if you could go anywhere in the world." She chose to go to Kimmasaccalottamely, a land she made up and peopled with "bees with bendy knees." Her poem was among five winners. She got to read it on Wisconsin Public Television.

It's not surprising, then, that Harvey, 35, has now won another prize _ this one among the leading poetry awards in the nation.

Last week, she was awarded the Kingsley Tufts prize for "Modern Life," her third collection of poems, which also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle poetry award and was a 2008 New York Times notable book.

The Kingsley Tufts award, established in 1992 by Claremont Graduate University in California, carries a $100,000 prize and is given each year to mid-career poets. Milwaukee professor and poet John Koethe won it for his 1997 collection, "Falling Water."

"It's unbelievable. I feel sort of overwhelmed. It's hard to feel deserving of something like that, but I'm absolutely thrilled," Harvey said from her office in Bronxville, N.Y., where she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Harvey is recognized as a contemporary poet enchanted with wordplay, and writing about hybrid beings and devastation and terror. "Modern Life," for instance, contains a pair of poems _ "Terror of the Future" and "The Future of Terror" _ that deal with the disconnect between civilians and the militia in a post-apocalyptic world. And she writes of a "robo-boy," half robot, half boy.

"I think I've always been interested in dividing lines _ whether they were borders or countries, or the dividing line in water (above and below the waterline)," she said in a phone interview. "I was thinking of animals who were half one thing and half another thing. Of a robot boy."

The terror poems, she said, were "almost political poems addressing the political climate post-Sept. 11. But they were quite transformed, sort of like the moon's relation to the E arth. Not exactly connected to this world, but reflected to and connected to this world in that way."

"She is an innovative, very playful and witty poet but she conceals behind the wit a kind of sadness and fear," says poet Kevin Prufer, who edits "Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing." "She has a real sense of looming darkness and sadness and emptiness under the wit, which makes her a more interesting poet . That kind of tension makes it very interesting."

Harvey has written poems since she was 8 years old. Among her favorite books as a child was "A Child's Garden of Verses" by Robert Louis Stevenson. "I really loved that book," she remembered. "But I don't think I made a distinction between poetry or short stories or novels until much later. I didn't know at that age that you could be a poet in contemporary life. That didn't dawn on me until college."

Harvey was born in Germany to a German mother and an English father. The family moved to the Milwaukee area when she was 8. After graduating from Whitefish Bay High School in 1991, she received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and went on to graduate with an MFA degree from Iowa University.

"It was in college that I started to write serious poetry," she said. "I took my first poetry class my junior year with Henri Cole, and that was it _ I had found what I wanted to do." Poet Henri Cole himself was a student of poet John Koethe, the Kingsley Tufts award winner who teaches philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Although she lives in Brooklyn, Matthea Harvey's connections with Wisconsin remain strong. She returns often to visit her parents, who live in Bayside. Her husband, Rob Casper, is a Fond du Lac native who works for the Poetry Society of America in New York City and runs a literary magazine called Jubilat.

Asked what inspires her poetry, she said, "Lots of things in the real world inspire me, and I think then I leap into something more imaginary from there."

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© 2009, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.