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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
Poetry
Translations
Came
Sciences
Interest
Japanese
Also
Literary
Background
Backgrounds
Chinese
Mathematics
Translation

More quotes by Robert Morgan

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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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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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We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
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Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.
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One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
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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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I considered going to film school I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
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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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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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The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
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One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.
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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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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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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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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan