Quote

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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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Actually
Atomic
Human
Devices
Humans
Unexpected
Sometimes
Accomplish
Time
Choice
Choices
Powerful
Geologic
Word
Distort

More quotes by 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.
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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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The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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 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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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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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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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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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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