Robert Morgan Quotes

• If people associate me with a region, that’s fine with me.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Fine, Associate, Region

• In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Best, Become, Almost

• 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

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  Tags in Myself, Writing, Through

• 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

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  Tags in Free, Wrong, Problems

• 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

  Topics in Father

  Tags in Everything

• 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.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Powerful, Human, Sometimes

• 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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  Tags in Powerful, Talking, Poetry

• Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Parents, Writing, Sensitive

• Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Powerful, Writing

• 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

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Far

• 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.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Home, Thought

• In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Real, Person

• 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.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Person, Working

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Back, Fact, Language

• Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Honesty

  Tags in Find, Tough

• Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Attention, Almost, Language

• Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, American, Whether

• 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.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sense, Values

• Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

  Robert Morgan

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  Tags in Important, Read

• Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writer

Robert Morgan (56)

Birth:	1944
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Poet, Writer

About

Robert Morgan studied at North Carolina State University as an engineering and mathematics major, transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an English major, graduating in 1965, and completed an MFA degree at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1968. He teaches at Cornell University beginning in 1971.

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Today's Anniversary - 6th January

Births

• 1944 - Rene Rivkin
• 1946 - Syd Barrett
• 1915 - Alan Wilson Watts
• 1892 - Stella Benson
• 1970 - Julie Chen

Deaths

• 1882 - Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
• 1993 - Dizzy Gillespie
• 1919 - Theodore Roosevelt
• 1919 - Max Heindel
• 1981 - A. J. Cronin