Quotes By Robert Morgan

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.

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

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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