Robert Morgan
Robert Morgan
firsts young-writers magazines
Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
chinese important littles
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
real talking voice
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.
rocks mtv rock-and-roll
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.
thinking these-days best-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.
writing blood students
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.
rhyming facts blank
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
reading writing decision
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.
honesty tough sense-of-humor
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
art thinking way
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.
character voice hiking
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.
writing curiosity way
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.
house isolation painter
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.
technique famous-writers make-sense
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.