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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Robert Morgan

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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Forms
Poet
Form
Stills
Poems
Still
Poets
Writing
Southern
Dramatic
Narrative

More quotes by Robert Morgan

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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Robert Morgan
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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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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
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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.
Robert Morgan
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I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan