Quote

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

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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Lifetime
Poetry
Minutes
Century
Distortions
Powerful
Distortion
Talking
Passes
Use
Devices
Way
Minute

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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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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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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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.
Robert Morgan