Quote

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

Robert Morgan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Language
Elementary
Experience
Preoccupation
Thing
Immediate
Literary
Discovering
Philosophical
Create
Linguistics
Less
Linguistic

More quotes by Robert Morgan

Image
When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
Robert Morgan
Image
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.
Robert Morgan
Image
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
Robert Morgan
Image
I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
Robert Morgan
Image
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
Robert Morgan
Image
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
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.
Robert Morgan
Image
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