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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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" 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

Off

Family

Young

" 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 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. "

" Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there. "

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

" I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Robert Morgan

Modern

English

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts. "

" Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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