Robert Morgan

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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 don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”

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