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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

Robert Morgan

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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Really
Helps
People
Poetry
Doubt
Courses
American
Whether
Helping
Doubts
Writing
Swear

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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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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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.
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Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
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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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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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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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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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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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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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Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
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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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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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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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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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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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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