Quotes By Robert Morgan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.