Quotes By Robert Morgan

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.

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.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.