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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
Ways
Away
Important
Writing
Intrudes
Years
Excitement
Way
Poetry
Teaching
Taking

More quotes by Robert Morgan

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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
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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.
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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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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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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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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 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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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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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 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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Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
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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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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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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.
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