Robert Morgan

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.

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.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

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.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

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.

I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

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.

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.

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.