Quotes By Robert Morgan

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.

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

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

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 Chevrolets every year are new.

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.

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

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 Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

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

I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

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.

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

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 you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.

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.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

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.

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 to start.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

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.

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.

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