Robert Morgan Quotes
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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.
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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.
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The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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.
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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.
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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
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A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
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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.
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Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
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If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.
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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.
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Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.
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Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.
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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.
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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.
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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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