Quotes from Robert Morgan

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

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.

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 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.

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.

We don't know a tenth of what there is to know," Mr. Pendergast said. "Why we don't even know a sixth.

When things are going badly, when you feel trapped between sword and sea, when you're under assault, acknowledge the devil—but keep your eyes on Christ. He will see you through. He will make a way.

There is a smell that lung sickness gives people. It's the smell of blood and congestion and fever. It's the smell of blood mixed with air that hangs over a bed and fills a sickroom. It's the smell of old blood, and blood that is fresh and already old. It's the smell of a festering wound.

The good Lord made the world so we could earn our joy, Ma said. But it's no guarantee we'll ever be happy.