Robert Morgan

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.