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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

More quotes by Robert Morgan

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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
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.
Robert Morgan
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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Robert Morgan
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Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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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
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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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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.
Robert Morgan