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. – Robert Morgan
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. – Robert Morgan
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. – Robert Morgan
I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
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. – Robert Morgan
