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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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" 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

New

Poetry

Art

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. "

" It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. "

" Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form. "

" I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction. "

Robert Morgan

Than

Think

" 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

Language

Kind

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Robert Morgan

Fine

Region

" Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity. "

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

" I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry. "

" The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. "

Robert Morgan

Modern

English

" 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. "

" 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. "