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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: 79
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Writing
Intrudes
Years
Excitement
Way
Poetry
Teaching
Taking
Ways
Away
Important

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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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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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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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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Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
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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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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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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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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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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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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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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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Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
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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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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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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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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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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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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Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
Robert Morgan