Quotes by Robert Morgan

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I dont think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you cant teach them is the very essence of poetry.

I dont think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

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

I dont 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.

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.

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.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

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

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we cant define it.

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.

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 its timeless, that it reaches back.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.