Quotes By Robert Morgan

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.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

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.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

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

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.

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.

I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.

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.

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.

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

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

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.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

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.

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

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.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

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.

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

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.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

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

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

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.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.