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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
Powerful
Distortion
Talking
Passes
Use
Devices
Way
Minute
Lifetime
Poetry
Minutes
Century
Distortions

More quotes by 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.
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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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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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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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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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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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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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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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 great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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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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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