I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet. – 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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – 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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
