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
Choices
Powerful
Geologic
Word
Distort
Actually
Atomic
Human
Devices
Humans
Unexpected
Sometimes
Accomplish
Time
Choice

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.
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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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.
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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.
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
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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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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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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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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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Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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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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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.
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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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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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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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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Robert Morgan