Robert Morgan
Robert Morgan
teaching thinking kind
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
father personality excess
I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.
writing thinking fiction
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
writing past thinking
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.
young-writers stories bedtime
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.
modern poetry-is watersheds
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
powerful choices unexpected
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.
facts language ancient
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.
definitions attention language
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
teaching writing years
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
art years ideas
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.
long people narrative
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.
impossible poetry-is courses
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.
character thinking ideas
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.