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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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Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Years
Excitement
Way
Poetry
Teaching
Taking
Ways
Away
Important
Writing
Intrudes

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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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.
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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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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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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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 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 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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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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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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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
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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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I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.
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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