Top 30 Robert Morgan Quotes

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.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If people associate me with a region, that’s fine with me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation… discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.