Robert Morgan Quotes on Poetry (25 Quotes)

I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.

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.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

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.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

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.

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.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

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.

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.

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.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

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

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

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

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

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.