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 Quote

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 Quote

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.
- Robert Morgan Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
- Robert Morgan Quote

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
- Robert Morgan Quote

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
- Robert Morgan Quote

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
- Robert Morgan Quote

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 Quote

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
- Robert Morgan Quote

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.
- Robert Morgan Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.
- Robert Morgan Quote

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
- Robert Morgan Quote

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 Quote