About Matthea Harvey

Matthea Harvey’s poem focuses on the difference between poetry and actual experience, and also between poetry and prose. The poem itself is purposefully formed into a straightforward paragraph. Harvey’s point was that it is both and neither poetry and/or prose, just as the centaur is both horse and man, the mermaids are both women and fish, and the griffins are both lions and birds. The Berlin Wall too, separates two halves of a country which are both the same country and no longer the same country.

As the centaur sketches on his napkin, a “Wall” is something that saws in half, “you know this too” that each half of you is you and yet is not you without the other half. What one part of the reader may want, such as knowledge, the other half despises. The other half wants to be free of all knowledge, blissfully unaware, amid a mystical or ultimately real experience. The poem and the poet try to do both, and the poem and the poet are both hybrids.