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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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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Seems
Writing
Kind
Poets
Poet
Poetry
Dead
Language
Ends

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.
Robert Morgan
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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.
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
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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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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.
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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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
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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.
Robert Morgan
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The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
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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Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
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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.
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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Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
Robert Morgan