Top 56 Quotes by Robert Morgan

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

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.

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.

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.