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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. "
Robert Morgan
Me
Language
Kind
Related Quotes:
" 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
Way
Go
Poetry
" The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry. "
Robert Morgan
Will
Poetry
Fact
" It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. "
Robert Morgan
Create
Experience
You
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
Interest
Through
Poetry
" 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
Poetry
Love
Authority
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
People
You
Time
" I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale. "
Robert Morgan
Time
You
Words
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
Stereotypes
Students
Dirt
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
Off
Family
Young
" In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible. "
Robert Morgan
Language
Best
Invisible
" I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood. "
Robert Morgan
Know
Painful
Students
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
See
Size
Poetry
" The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character. "
Robert Morgan
Black
Voice
Mountain
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
Lot
Students
Stereotypes
" I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. "
Robert Morgan
Driven
Personality
Returning
" What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it. "
Robert Morgan
Define
See
Poetry
" The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. "
Robert Morgan
More
Modern
English
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
Curiosity
Life
Myself
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
Memorable
Wrong
Free
" Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing. "
Robert Morgan
Been
Writing
Sensitive
" Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet. "
Robert Morgan
Sense Of Humor
Tough
Humor
" 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
People
Rock And Roll
Rock
" Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems. "
Robert Morgan
Narrative
Dramatic
Writing
" Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places. "
Robert Morgan
Events
Intimacy
Places
" Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. "
Robert Morgan
Important
The Most Important
Poetry
" A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. "
Robert Morgan
Discovery
Connection
Voice
" 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
Well
Known
People
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
American
Best
Enjoyment
" 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. "
Robert Morgan
Poetry
Decision
Narrative
" Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. "
Robert Morgan
Important
Over
Writing