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"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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"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."

"Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig."
Explore more quotes by Robert Morgan

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience."

"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."

"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
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