Robert Morgan Quotes

59 quotes in 809 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
• 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…
• I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way…
• I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. I seem…
• It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. Maybe…
• 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…
• 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,…
• Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
• 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…
• 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…

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