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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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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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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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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
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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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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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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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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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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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I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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