"I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery"
About this Quote
Robert Morgan treats language like a tangible material, something to plane, carve, and polish until it has grain you can feel. Texture, in his sense, is the interplay of sound, rhythm, image, and syntax that makes words do more than deliver information; they rustle, echo, scrape, and flow. A vowel can carry mist, a string of plosives can roll like gravel, a long winding sentence can meander like a creek through hollows. Coming from a writer steeped in Appalachian landscapes and fascinated by geology, the metaphor is telling: words stratify into layers, and the pleasures of reading include touching those layers with the inner hand.
The crucial condition follows: you can build those textures as long as they seem like a discovery. That caveat guards against ornament for ornament's sake. Artifice is allowed, even welcomed, if it feels uncovered rather than contrived. The writer must be the first explorer, not the stage manager; the reader must sense surprise, the feeling that the language arrived because the moment demanded it. Texture should grow out of attention to the world and the subject, not from a desire to show off craft.
The line also frames a compact between process and effect. Discovery is both how the writer works and what the reader experiences. When a phrase suddenly clicks and a sentence takes an unexpected turn, the text reveals something about reality and about itself. Morgan's fiction and poems often move this way, layering precise detail about wood, water, weather, and work with a lyrical pressure that feels earned. Dialect, cadence, and technical vocabulary become instruments of seeing, not just local color.
By submitting texture to the test of discovery, Morgan proposes an ethic of style: let the music of language be the byproduct of curiosity and attention. When words keep finding rather than forcing, texture becomes truth's companion, and the page turns from surface into terrain.
The crucial condition follows: you can build those textures as long as they seem like a discovery. That caveat guards against ornament for ornament's sake. Artifice is allowed, even welcomed, if it feels uncovered rather than contrived. The writer must be the first explorer, not the stage manager; the reader must sense surprise, the feeling that the language arrived because the moment demanded it. Texture should grow out of attention to the world and the subject, not from a desire to show off craft.
The line also frames a compact between process and effect. Discovery is both how the writer works and what the reader experiences. When a phrase suddenly clicks and a sentence takes an unexpected turn, the text reveals something about reality and about itself. Morgan's fiction and poems often move this way, layering precise detail about wood, water, weather, and work with a lyrical pressure that feels earned. Dialect, cadence, and technical vocabulary become instruments of seeing, not just local color.
By submitting texture to the test of discovery, Morgan proposes an ethic of style: let the music of language be the byproduct of curiosity and attention. When words keep finding rather than forcing, texture becomes truth's companion, and the page turns from surface into terrain.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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