"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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Robert Morgan quotes (page 2 of 3)
56 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does."
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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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"Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry."
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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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"The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry."
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"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."
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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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"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
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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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"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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"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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"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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"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new."
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"One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person."
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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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"Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there."
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"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."
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"If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me."
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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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