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.
Robert Morgan

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.
Robert Morgan

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.
Robert Morgan

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.
Robert Morgan

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.
Robert Morgan

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

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.
Robert Morgan

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.
Robert Morgan

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
John Drinkwater

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

A lot happens by accident in poetry.
Howard Nemerov

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
Rita Dove

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

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
Manuel Puig

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

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

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
Lafcadio Hearn

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

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

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