Matthea Harvey’s poems are marvellous contraptions. They explore and present artifices in the best sense, as disclosures of fabrication into plays of significance, demonstrating along the way innovative and resourceful poetic syntaxes.

– Dean Young

In Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, Matthea Harvey uses lack of punctuation, line breaks and the capitalisation at the beginning of lines towards a well balanced outcome of satisfying the expectations of the reader and opposing them. The duality of purpose of the first words seems to function in two opposing ways, heightening tension, allowing juxtaposition. The words seem to act as connectives, giving the narrative and/or imagery a cohesiveness literal in the sense that two lines share a word. However, this duality also works in defying expectation syntactically, allowing digression.

Write a poem where you use words at the beginning of the line in a duality like Harvey does, so that the altering of syntax is not only destructive but also constructive.

THE GEM IS ON PAGE SIXTY-FOUR

Ahem said the guards when anyone lingered too long
With their nose in a posy & then came the stuttered
Explanation was required if one seemed to be admiring
Anything could provoke a ticket even a certain glazing
Of the eye that seemed to signify some secret rapture
How the rupture between looking & looking had happened
Was a mystery (perhaps there had once been a sallow queen)
But it was best to wear dark sunglasses & mutter what a waste
Of marble when in the proximity of beauty even if it was
Necessary acts of loveliness such as trimming the olive trees
Were scheduled for Non-Moon nights so the silvery branches
In piles around the ladders wouldn’t have any added
Attraction between young men & women was now a case
Of smuggled petticoats & plain brown cakes that had
Icing on the inside & in the schoolyard children traded
Beauty Cards listing what page & book to look in for something
Scandalous things had happened in a town up north it was
Rumored that all the pretty girls had pranced down the cobbled
Hill holding gold picture frames around their faces & a man
With a cane began surreptitiously tracing where the sun was
Hitting the stones & then the mayor whispered that line of
Shakespeare into his wife’s ear & she looked momentarily
Sentimental outbreaks were not uncommon & there were crews
Trained in containment but they could never predict the next
One day they’d come upon a soda fountain each customer looking
At his or her fizzy drink with an expression of absolute bliss
Or two boys in a basement in ecstasy over something imaginary
Which couldn’t be taken away & poured down the sink