Robert Morgan

Quotes by Robert Morgan

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

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• The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

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

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• 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.

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

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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.

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• I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

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