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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

Robert Morgan

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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Modern
Great
Watershed
Watersheds
French
English
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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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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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 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 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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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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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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The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
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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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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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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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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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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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
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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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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 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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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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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