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I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Robert Morgan

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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Chinese
Mathematics
Translation
Poetry
Translations
Came
Sciences
Interest
Japanese
Also
Literary
Background
Backgrounds

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In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.
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Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
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The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
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I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
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It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.
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Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
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Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
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In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.
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A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.
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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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