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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.

Robert Morgan

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Robert Morgan
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Chinese
Mathematics
Translation
Poetry
Translations
Came
Sciences
Interest
Japanese
Also
Literary
Background
Backgrounds

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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
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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.
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Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
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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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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.
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We don't want to live in the dark moods of imponderable mystery, but neither do we want to miss them altogether. they allow us to emerge from the tender sadness of the manger to sing with the angels in the skies above.
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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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I considered going to film school I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
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Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
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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.
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Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
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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.
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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.
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The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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