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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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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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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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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