Matthea Harvey's "In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Matthea Harvey, the author of five books of poetry—If the Tabloids are True What Are You?, Of Lamb (an illustrated erasure with images by Amy Jean Porter), Modern Life (a finalist for the National Book Critics Cirlcle Award and a New York Times Notable Book), Sad Little Breathing Machine and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. She has also published two children’s books, Cecil the Pet Glacier, illustrated by Giselle Potter and The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.Snowflake (2009), illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel. In 2017, Harvey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

—Bio via MattheaHarvey.info

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Heidi White, and today is Wednesday, July 26, 2023.
0:10.5	Today's poem is by Mathia Harvey, and it's called In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden. I'll read it once and offer a few comments, and then I'll read it a final time.
0:22.0	In defense of our overgrown garden, last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart.
0:30.0	Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and landed in the middle of those ever so slightly green leaves that seem no mix of seeds in soil,
0:39.8	but of pastels and light and chalk X's mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down.
0:46.5	I've seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence and see our espalier pear trees
0:51.1	bowing out of shape. I did like that. They looked like candelabras against the wall,
0:56.0	but what's the sense in swooning over pruning, I said as much to Mrs. Jones, and I swear she threw
1:01.6	her cane at me and walked off down the street without it. Has always puzzled me that people
1:06.7	coo over bonsai trees when you can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of a struggle
1:12.4	ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets. So after untangling the two, I took the nets off
1:19.1	and watched the birds with red beaks fly by all morning at the window. I reread your letter
1:24.7	about how the castles you flew over and made crenellated shadows on the water and the rain barrel has overflowed and made a small swamp.
1:33.7	I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp.
1:36.6	Don't worry.
1:37.5	If there is no fog on the day you come home, I will build a bonfire so the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them.
1:45.8	To close, I'm sorry,
1:55.9	there won't be any salad, and I love you. Mitha Harvey was born in 1973. She's still living. She was born in Germany and she lived as a small child in the UK and then she moved to the US at age eight. She graduated from
2:03.2	Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa. And she's published several
2:10.4	collections of poetry. And I chose this one because I too have an overgrown garden right now
2:17.4	that feels purposeful. I want to defend
2:20.8	the fact that it's overgrown as if its abundance reflects the nature of high summer itself,
	...

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