Robert Morgan

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

“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.”

“The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.”

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

“The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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