Robert Morgan Quotations

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

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.

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

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

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.

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

When we examined budget issues last year, we realized if we kept going the way we were going, we would have to increase taxes 28 percent over four years and we had to look at ways to compromise.

We felt like we had to buy some time. I sure am glad I'm not playing this week. The course is ready, it's in good shape. It's just the whole mental attitude of people. We are just so inundated. Everybody is tired and overworked. I just don't think, psychologically, the people in this area are ready to support a golf tournament. And buying the extra 30 days is going to make all the difference in the world.

With the latest increase, New Jersey families will spend another $543 to send their children to Rutgers this year. That's an unexpected expense that will put a strain on most families' budgets. We're asking our colleagues in the state Legislature to join us in supporting this bill's passage so that this does not happen again next year. We have a historic commitment to make higher education available to our students.

We're looking forward to making this bill a bipartisan effort and to seeing it move in the Legislature when we are back in session during the fall.

Most people think they are underpaid. Everybody wants to get more.

I'd always heard about that battle. As I got older and studied military history, I found that the Battle of Cowpens was studied all over the world.

Historically, when the Fed has paused, that has generally been a good time for stocks. We're reasonably bullish on stocks.

We made some tough decisions and now we need to stick to them and hope for better times. We can?t let emotions get in the way of decisions.

Part of the pleasure of being a writer is that you get to go to unexpected places. If a place sounds interesting, I like to go.

We came up. We thought we'd be here about nine months. Things just clicked. The timing was good.

While pay and benefits were important, they weren't real drivers of retention.

Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

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.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

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

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

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

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

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

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.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

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.

We would not want to lose one person over this, and will do everything in our power and influence to make sure that doesn't happen,

We would like to put people's minds at ease as to whether the petroleum business is responding to circumstances that are beyond its control, or if there is an element of greed in the recent price increases,

To cancel would be worse PR than playing it,

Breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. It seems like the better we feed them, the more creative they are.

They emptied 14 saddles in the first charge.

There's a lot to be said for creating a favorable work culture when you're competing against the security of a larger corporation.

It's one of the ways employees deal with work-life balance issues. Because we're spending so much time at work, that's the only time we have to schedule some of those appointments.

It's one of the ways employees deal with work-life balance issues.

It makes you feel like you are accomplishing something. But you really can't take it for granted. You have to keep going. It doesn't mean anything to be No. 1 in the middle of the season.

It's important to recognize people's demands from the private side of life.

Once all the results are in, I think this is going to be a positive earnings season. Some of the headline names have disappointed.

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.

I like libraries a lot. I like to help libraries.

I like to just walk the ground of place I'm writing about.

All, however, is not bleak, ... For many years it was thought that early-stage ovarian cancer did not give symptoms. Several papers published in the past four to five years, however, have shown that 90 percent of women with early-stage ovarian cancer do have symptoms.

What language shall I borrow To thank Thee, dearest Friend, For this, Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end? O make me Thine forever, And should I fainting be, Lord, let me never, never Outlive my love for Thee.

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...