Robert Morgan Quotes

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet... view

By: Robert Morgan

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

By: Robert Morgan

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later... view

By: Robert Morgan

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts... view

By: Robert Morgan

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

By: Robert Morgan

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems... view

By: Robert Morgan

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

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

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... view

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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

By: Robert Morgan

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

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity... view

By: Robert Morgan

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places... view

By: Robert Morgan

I considered going to film school.. view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry... view

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... view

By: Robert Morgan

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think... view

By: Robert Morgan

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

By: Robert Morgan