Quotes By Robert Morgan

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.

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.

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

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

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.

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.

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.

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

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

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 the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

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.

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

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.

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.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

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.