Quote

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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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Love
Poetry
Fact
Language
Facts
Form
Reaches
Part
Timeless
Seems
Ancient
Back
Authority

More quotes by Robert Morgan

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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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I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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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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Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
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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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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 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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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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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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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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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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.
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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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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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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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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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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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