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. Robert Morgan Read Quote
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts. Robert Morgan Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. Robert Morgan Read Quote
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. Robert Morgan Read Quote
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. Robert Morgan Read Quote
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. Robert Morgan Read Quote
I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. Robert Morgan Read Quote
I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery. Robert Morgan Read Quote
