Quote

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

Robert Morgan

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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Wrong
Free
Verse
Problem
Verses
Much
Memorable
Something
Poem
Poetry
Problems
Probably

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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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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 fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
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The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
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Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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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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I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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We don't want to live in the dark moods of imponderable mystery, but neither do we want to miss them altogether. they allow us to emerge from the tender sadness of the manger to sing with the angels in the skies above.
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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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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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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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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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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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 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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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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