"You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does."
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Robert Morgan quotes (page 1 of 3)
56 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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 have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else."
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"Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity."
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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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"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 seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess."
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"Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places."
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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 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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"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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"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
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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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"I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry."
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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 love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery."
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"I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that."
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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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