Robert Morgan

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

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

“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.”

“Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”