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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

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.

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.

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.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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