Quotes from Robert Morgan

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

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.

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.

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.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.