Quotes By Robert Morgan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.