Robert Morgan's relationship with The Carolina Quarterly stretches back to his days as an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill, when he served as the magazine's fiction editor. In 1964 CQ published his story "A Fading Light," reprinted in our summer 1993 forty-fifth anniversary issue. Morgan turned to writing mainly poetry, and in 1969 his first book, Zirconia Poems, appeared.

Since then Morgan has won a reputation as one of the country's finest poets, and The Carolina Quarterly is proud to have featured many of his poems over the past quarter-century. A sampling of his work, Green River: New and Selected Poems, appeared in 1991. Most recently Gnomon Press has published a substantial chapbook, Wild Peavines (1996).

In recent years Morgan has returned to fiction. He has published two story collections, The Blue Valleys (1989) and The Mountains Won't Remember Us (1992), followed by two novels, The Hinterlands (1994) and The Truest Pleasure (1995).

Originally from Henderson County in western North Carolina, since the early seventies Morgan has lived in central New York, where he is a professor of English at Cornell University. Although part of our interview was conducted in writing, most of it took place immediately after Morgan's recent visit to Michael McFee's UNC-CH class on North Carolina writers.

CQ: You're in your early 50s. Philip Levine has remarked that turning 50 brings with it a significant loss of energy, including energy for writing. On the other hand, poets such as Yeats and Wallace Stevens did what many consider their best work after middle age. How do you see getting older affecting your own work?

RM: Miraculously some poets do sustain their work and even grow better in their 50s and 60s and 70s. I think of Hardy and Edwin Muir, as well as Yeats and Stevens. But they are the exceptions. The rule is that poets do tend to lose their verve in their late 40s and early 50s. But let's be grateful for the exceptions.

On the other hand such late blooming is even rarer among fiction writers. A graduate student once asked me to name a great novel written after the author was 60. I said, "Why sure." But in fact I came up only with Billy Budd, which is perhaps more a novella than a novel.

Now that people are living longer, and keeping their health longer, all this may change. The sustained concentration for writing novels and poems may be possible into the 70s and even 80s in the future. I hope so. I would like to think I am just getting started.

CQ: Are there particular ways you see yourself changing as a writer? What kind of changes do you see in your writing up to this point?

RM: Well I can see when I look back at my early poems that I was interested in elemental things then: I wanted to write poems about simple objects, I wanted to write poems about metals, poems about insects. I think that was the way I had to start out. The ideal poem for me when I was 25 would have been a poem that really evoked a sense of, say, evaporation, the elemental process. As I've gotten older I still admire that sort of poetry, but I've gotten increasingly interested in putting things in context — historical, human — telling stories in poems, writing longer poems. I've gotten increasingly involved in the way in which voice and idiom can be used in traditional forms, so you're playing at least two games at once, doing something formal, plus the narrative voice, the meditative voice.

I don't know what my poems in the future will be like. I have a sense that I want to go back to writing poetry full time, when I complete the cycle of stories I've been working on. And I don't know how writing so much fiction will affect the poetry, but I suspect it will make it more voice-dominant, voice-centered, and perhaps more dramatic in the sense that a character is speaking rather than the poet or some anonymous narrator. But I certainly do want to continue developing as a poet, and part of the excitement is you don't know how it's going to go. I have a sense in my own case that poetry has been something given to me at times, and I was often very surprised at the direction it would take, or at the subjects that would come to me. I believe that you change as a poet when you get new subjects; it isn't just a formal thing. Maybe there's a way in which I don't want to know what kind of poems I'll be writing in the future. That will be part of the fun, just to see. But I do plan to write more poems, and probably to write poems more than fiction.

I started this cycle of stories and novels about 10-15 years ago, and the idea has been I would finish this one story and get back to poetry. But every story leads to another one, and as long as I'm excited by them and the fiction keeps me going…. I really 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. I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

CQ: Your remarks on the poems getting longer bring to mind Michael McFee's essay in Iron Mountain Review. He points out a progression from Zirconia Poems through Red Owl and Land Diving toward a longer form: something that's in a sense more relaxed, more drawn-out. Do you think it's typical for the young poet to look for an extremely compressed utterance?

RM: I'm not sure that it's typical. It was necessary for me because of the way I approached poetry. I did not have a very literary background when I got interested in poetry. I came to poetry writing from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation. When I first started writing poems I wanted a poem that was so concise it was almost disembodied. I got that idea partly from these translations of Taoist poems and Zen poems — poems spoken as though they were in a timeless medium, not located in the idiom of the present. Philosophical poems, poems of religious, meditative depth. That partly explains that tone you're talking about. I did not have the idea they would be spoken in American slang or anything like that. But 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. I would have said, if you'd asked me that question in 1967, that I wanted to achieve a sense of impersonality and timelessness.

CQ: Did you find Pound and Eliot helpful as American intermediaries between that Japanese and Chinese inspiration and what you wanted to do?

RM: Both of them, extremely. Originally Pound. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry in Cathay was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. Partly through the way I saw in the Quartets Eliot could arrange sentences — beautiful sentences — into lines — perfect lines of poetry. For me that was just a breakthrough discovery. So both those poets were very important to me. Probably Pound a little bit more early on. Pound's sense of getting to the essence of poetry. Pound knows how to talk to young poets. He tells them what they want to know about sound, about cadence, about line. My elementalism probably came partly from reading Pound, particularly what I consider his greatest book and one of the great books of modern poetry, Cathay, just a pamphlet really, published about 1915.

CQ: There seems to be another progression in your poetry, toward an acceptance of the sufficiency of words to carry meaning. In the early poetry there's a sort of Symbolist tendency to stretch and strain the language; it's bursting with the desire to convey the quiddity of things. For instance in an early poem, "Beginning," from Zirconia Poems, you end with "the pines / roaring their blackness at the fields." And even in a somewhat later poem, "Paradise's Fool," from Land Diving, there too there's a sense that the language is straining to try to carry the meaning. But later that sense dissipates.

RM: Yes, I was struggling to find language that would carry the experience of the world, of things. How new this process was to me. I wasn't coming to poetry from a literary angle, the way other writers do, knowing a lot of English poetry. But with this other thing in mind, which was finding a way to make language convey a sense of the world. The pine trees, the wind — it's this elemental thing I was talking about. And conveying as much the haecceity as the quiddity, to use Hopkins' polarities: quiddity being the whatness of something, to know it as type, and haecceity the specificity, the individual thing.

But what you are talking about is something real. It's the dramatization implicit in the language of the struggle to find words adequate to experience. That's exactly where I was. It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation. Discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. It has been described by another critic as a drama of someone who feels in a very eerie, unsettled world. Strange. Scary. And that experience dominates the first two books. Then 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, I think it was Mary Williams, up at Emory and Henry, pointed that out.

Another way of putting it came from one of my colleagues at Cornell, who said that in my early poems I could have been writing as an Anglo-Saxon poet: in the kenning and the riddle-making, in the sense of being in a haunted world. But I believe that all poetry does that to some extent. Through poetry, especially through that kind of poetry, we recover a sense of animism. That's the Stone Age aspect, when you get back into a world that's spirited, where things are spirits, alive and connected, what philosophers call holistic animism. You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization to achieve that perception. But it's one of the great things poetry does.

CQ: Another poet from the North Carolina mountains, Fred Chappell, has written about his fascination with French Symbolism, which your early approach to language does put me in mind of. Why do you think poets like you and Chappell, growing up in rural western North Carolina, would share such a grappling with language with someone like Stéphane Mallarmé? Or Arthur Rimbaud, whom Chappell talks about in his "Rimbaud Fire Letter"?

RM: It may be that there's a connection across time because of the isolation of western North Carolina. If you are writing poetry as a young native of the mountains of North Carolina, you necessarily have very little sense of connection with a contemporary scene or an American tradition, and therefore may be able to identify with what is most original and greatest in modern poetry, which is probably French poetry.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. When I was in my mid-20s the poets I was reading most were Baudelaire and Nerval and Rimbaud. My sense was that what they were doing cut down to the bedrock — in perception, the use of language — more than anything I knew in English. If you wanted to go to the source that's where you went.

I felt connected a little bit later with New England writing, because culturally and theologically I had gone through similar experiences to what Emerson and Thoreau went through 150 years before in New England. There was a real fundamentalist culture in western North Carolina, very much like what they knew around 1825 or 1830, and perhaps the very isolation of my background enabled me to feel a rapport with what those French writers were doing in the 1850s. When I read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Nerval, I saw that was the source, that was where it happened, that was the gold standard. And I still think that.

CQ: If, as you've remarked, the worst poetry of our time is that which connects directly with literary theory, how would you describe the best poetry of our time?

RM: The best poetry of any time does several things at once. The language feels fresh, feels spoken with passion and discovery. There is concision, and precision, a formal assurance and tightness. But voice and idiom are equally important, the sense of personality, of the gesture being made.

The kinds of contemporary poems that have meant the most to me have been those such as Philip Larkin's "Church Going" or "Wedding Wind" where all these come together, where the voice is contemporary, the idiom and form perfect, the lines unforgettable, said with ease. Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible.

CQ: Jonathan Williams recently told the North Carolina Literary Review that the whole idea of Southern writing is outdated, that in an age of easy air travel, when he can get from North Carolina to Connecticut in two hours, the whole concept is just blown out of the water. What do you think makes a Southern writer Southern? Why do you think Southern writers today make such good poets?

RM: Because they still have subject matter. They believe that poetry's about something. Not just about language, but about stories, about history, about characters, about nature. And that makes an enormous difference. 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. Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems — they're doing something vastly more interesting.

In some ways I think that illustrates the difference I'm talking about. A lot of Southern poets of our time have kept that sort of quality. And I don't know if it's regional or not, it's just the way it's turned out. Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful, that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that. 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.

CQ: Are you yourself wary of the label "Southern writer"?

RM: Oh, I don't care — some people want to call me an "Appalachian writer" — even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle. But as we enter the period of the new tribalism, etc., I think it's inevitable. And if people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.

Poetry is so located in the particular idiom that regionalism makes sense. Some writers are associated with Concord, Massachusetts at a certain time, or London, England at a certain time, or Dublin, Ireland, or with North Carolina. It's interesting that so many writers have come from North Carolina. Just today somebody in class asked me why I thought that was so. And my answer was that I think it's the example of Thomas Wolfe and Paul Green and other people. If you have some famous writers from an area, that gives young people the idea that they can be writers, aspire to it. Why are there so many writers in Mississippi? William Faulkner. When I was a student at NC State, every weekend the Raleigh paper would feature another North Carolina writer. It was clearly a way to get some attention, to be a writer.

CQ: And you yourself have won the North Carolina Award for Literature. So there's that sort of official attention.

RM: Yes, the Governor recognizes writers from North Carolina.

CQ: You're often asked about the relationship between your poetry and your fiction. Since many of your poems are short narratives, sometimes people ask how you decide whether a story should be developed in prose or in poetry. My question is a variation on that: given that you've written both long fiction and a few long nonnarrative poems, why not write long narrative poems?

RM: I began as a short story writer in the early 1960s, before I became involved with poetry at UNC-CH. So in a sense returning to prose fiction was a return to my first love. Your question is a good one, and one I've pondered over the years.

First, I like the aspect of prose fiction that Philip Larkin calls "the spread" of the novel. With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. In the best fiction the language itself can become almost invisible. Fiction is about intimacy with characters, with events, with places. Poetry almost by definition calls attention to its language and form.

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. If we are looking for a powerful gripping story we go to Dashiell Hammet, not Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers' narratives seem clumsy and overwritten in comparison.

If a story can be handled best by compression and implicitness, rather than by detail and step by step dramatization, I usually try it in verse. "The Gift of Tongues" works better as a poem than it might have in prose. I have both a poem and a story called "Death Crown," written fifteen years apart.

CQ: Do you think that long narrative poetry is an obsolete genre? Would you go so far as to call it archaic?

RM: I think so. I mean, we have a lot of long narrative poems written in the twentieth century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people. When people read a narrative they want to concentrate on the character, on the action, and not on the Spenserian stanza, or whatever stanza Browning used in The Ring and the Book. It still interests people, but it is a dead art to some extent. It's a little bit like reading poetry in Latin: there are people who do it, it's still great poetry, but it's not something that engages a lot of people.

When you have an idea for a story, for characters, you want that story and those characters to reach a lot of people, as many people as you can. And you want to put it in a medium that will be read. And I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, fits the culture, and so does film. I considered going to film school; I actually got the applications to UCLA and Southern California. When I was here at Chapel Hill I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing. But my wonderful teacher here, Jessie Rehder, said to me, "Bob, your talent is for language, and film is about images up on a screen. I think you will do better as a writer than as a filmmaker." And she was absolutely right. But I'm still enthralled by film.

CQ: Over twenty-five years ago you left western North Carolina to teach at Cornell, and you've been there ever since. It's obvious from Wild Peavines that you still draw inspiration from the region you grew up in, but is there ever a moment when you think of yourself as a central New York writer?

RM: I often say that I moved from Southern Appalachia to Northern Appalachia when I went to Cornell in 1971. The areas are similar in many ways, even in landscape. In fact, because of the rapid development in western North Carolina, central New York looks more like the Blue Ridge area used to. So in many ways I feel at home up there.

I have actually written a number of poems set in central New York, such as "Yellow," and several as yet unpublished short stories. But the work with the New York setting has not been noticed as much. In the future I want to write a series of stories set in the Finger Lakes region. And I have become more and more interested in central New York history.

But my ties to western North Carolina are so deep I doubt that I will ever escape them. My first sixteen years were spent on one particular piece of ground, and that seems to be the landscape that most nurtures my imagination. Being away from Henderson County has perhaps made me focus on it more intensely than I would had I stayed there. Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

In some everyday ways I've become very much a resident of central New York. And I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have found a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

CQ: John Ashbery, who used to support himself by writing art criticism and now teaches creative writing, has remarked that outside pressures can be good for a poet. On the other hand, A.R. Ammons and Thom Gunn, who also teach creative writing, have admitted in recent interviews that their own poetry work has to wait until the school term is over. How do your teaching and writing lives interact?

RM: Well the real answer to that is I don't know; I haven't analyzed it that closely. But I do think that teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, not least in taking away some of the excitement of poetry. When you're writing poems, when it's going well, there's a sense of soaringness, there's a real glory to writing, a sense of discovery, things are opening up, you're hearing voices. And when you're working as a teacher you lose some of that. In the workshop there's a concentration on technicalities necessarily, you're dealing with young writers who are really not very good at this point. You're spending a lot of time trying to be objective, and analytical, supportive, and you lose some of that excitement which is so essential for writing poetry.

I have been able to write while I was teaching. But I think over the years it saps some of the enthusiasm that's necessary for writing poetry. And furthermore I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers and coach them, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry, which is that thrill of discovery, of insight, of seeing something new, of hearing the cadence of poetry. It is simply unteachable.

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

CQ: Creative writing class does still seem an odd thing to many people.

RM: Some people swear by writing courses, and it's certainly enjoyable to teach them. Of the ways you could make a living teaching is probably one of the better ways. But whether it really helps American poetry I kind of have my doubts. I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years, as poetry has moved more and more into creative writing programs. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, or at least not to have hurt fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

CQ: As a creative writing teacher, you must find yourself counseling a number of students who want to write about their families. What sorts of dos and don'ts do you offer them?

RM: First I tell students that writing cannot be taught. I tell them I am more a coach than a teacher, and that they will have to teach themselves to write by endless practice, by persistence.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. There is no such thing as teaching writing as a skill without a subject. The writer's material might be family, or philosophical ideas, or love, or emotional trauma. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the clichés and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt. 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.

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when an idea, a scene, is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to touch quick, and draw blood.

CQ: I'd like to ask a few questions about Wild Peavines. "Attakullakulla Goes to London," like your earlier poem "Ninety-Six Line," portrays colonial Britain's dealings with the Cherokees. It's one of the few narrative poems in the book. How did you come to write it? Was there really an Attakullakulla?

RM: The most famous chief of the Cherokees in the 18th century was Attakullakulla, or The Little Carpenter. He was a clever, evasive, witty man, famous both for his wisdom and his resourcefulness in negotiations with the British. In the 1970s I spent some time studying the history of the Cherokees, and I always wanted to write about him. I have been told by a friend of mine who is Choctaw that my sense of history is "Cherokee-centric" because I know more about them than any other tribe.

Since I used to find arrowheads in the dirt while hoeing corn, I have been fascinated by the haunting presence of the Cherokees in western North Carolina. They are a shadow population in most counties, part of the community across time. I have a story called "The Tracks of Chief DeSoto" about their first contact with the whites in the 1540s.

CQ: "Mowing" and "Working in the Rain" are both about your father. Is there something about his combination of hard work and solitude that you find particularly inspirational as a poet?

RM: As I say in an essay in The Southern Review called "Work and Poetry: The Father Tongue," I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. There was nothing restrained or ordinary about him. That kind of personality lends itself to treatment in both fiction and poetry. He was an unforgettable presence, large in size and gesture, a tireless talker and storyteller, opinionated, intense, obsessed with the Bible and its prophecies, with history, with reading. He was unable to work with other people, and had to work in solitude. For someone with no formal education, he was remarkably well-informed, with a flair for dramatic language.

CQ: Why issue the poems of Wild Peavines as a chapbook?

RM: Two reasons. I didn't have enough poems for a new book: I went several years without writing poems, or writing very many poems. And I thought that would be a way of keeping my hand in, to publish a chapbook. And my friend Jonathan Greene, who runs Gnomon Press, is such a great book designer that I wanted him to do something else of mine. He did Groundwork years and years ago, and it just occurred to me one day to put together nineteen poems.

CQ: Why not just wait until there's a full book of poems?

RM: Well, I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish poems and read poems. You can sit down and read nineteen poems in a way you can't sit down and read fifty poems, sixty to seventy pages of poems. I've always regretted that the chapbook can't be put in bookstores. It's sold only by mail; they're bought by collectors. But you reach in some ways the most desirable audience, the best audience for your poetry in a chapbook. I like the look of them, the feel of them.

CQ: The first book publication of "Earache" was in your chapbook Bronze Age, but it didn't appear in a full-length book until Green River. You chose not to include it in either of the two intervening books. Why that sort of delay? I could just as well ask why, although "Chant Royal" was published in Poetry in 1978, that poem didn't appear in 1979's Groundwork. This goes to the idea of how you conceive of a book.

RM: That's a tough question. It's one of the toughest questions. What is a book of poetry? Some people will tell you that a book of poetry is a unit, has integrity just like a novel does, or a book of essays, a critical book. Other people will say a book of poetry is merely a collection of poems.

It's a problem I have pondered and worried about over all these years. I would say that the most important thing about a book of poetry is that it be a book of good poems, whether they're thematically linked or sequenced in some carefully orchestrated way or not. 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.

CQ: Coming back to you in particular, "Mowing" may be the most recent example of this. When was "Mowing" originally published?

RM: It was published in 1981, in Poetry.

CQ: And yet it wasn't included in 1987's At the Edge of the Orchard Country, in 1990's Sigodlin.

RM: I didn't want to publish it in a book as long as my father was alive. I thought it might embarrass him. He didn't read poetry magazines, but he looked at my books of poems when they came out. That's one of the few examples of where I've held a poem back because of the content. Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing, but since that poem is about his obsession, his particular obsession with mowing, I decided not to publish it in a book in his lifetime.

CQ: Occasionally you drop a highly unusual word into a poem, something striking that calls attention to itself. A couple of examples are "nous" in "Lightning Bug" and "frampold" in "Chant Royal." You've done this again in Wild Peavines: the final poem, "Chicken Scratches," contains the word "incunabula." Is this a deliberate technique?

RM: It fascinates me to bring worlds together that way, to bring a word from one frame of reference into another. The risk is that it will just seem imposed, that it won't add anything to the poem, so you have to be careful. But I love the idea of suddenly pulling in a whole new set of connotations just by diction, by word choice. You're using twentieth century language and suddenly you use a Shakespearean word like "frampold," or a scholarly word like "incunabula" in talking about chicken scratches in the backyard.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it doesn't seem completely imposed, and seems like a discovery. You get to the end of the poem — "the incunabula of morning" — which is a way of not only using the unexpected word, but of comparing the time span of the day to centuries, since "incunabula" takes you back to things printed in the fifteenth century. I love to do that, to compare different time frames and different scales, and if you can do it with one word that way, then it's even more effective. As Bill Harmon says in his essay on versification, poetry can evoke the time of the poetry and the time of the period of the subject, at the same time. And sometimes, by a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. Time and scale. So you can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime. You go from talking about something close up to evoking something very distant: a grain of sand here, the moon there, a planet out there. Alchemy is called 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, to see something vast as though it were tiny. Stevens talks about "The Planet on the Table." One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. And sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.

CQ: Wild Peavines contains one pantoum, "Oxbow Lakes." It's a very difficult form, yet you've published several. What draws you to it?

RM: I like the pantoum perhaps because it is at once so simple and so complex. The simplicity is that every line is merely repeated. The difficulty is that the interlocking quatrains must carry a narrative or argument, make sense with all the repetition. It's a folk form in Malaya, where they have "pantoum parties" where the participants sit in a circle making up interlocking quatrains. The pantoums that have worked best for me are those where reflection, repetition, echo, are part of the subject.

CQ: There's a movement afoot that calls itself New Formalism. Although you've written poems in many traditional forms, when I see the New Formalists enumerated your name is not among them. How do you relate to this would-be renaissance of formalistic poetry?

RM: I really don't know the answer to that, since I came to formalism on my own; I'm not a part of any school. But I am certainly interested in the recovery of the resources of English poetry that were lost in the 60s and 70s American free verse movement. It's as though poets tossed out many of the devices that really make poetry work. I'm glad to see them coming back.

Mere formalism doesn't get you very far in poetry. A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. And what really works in any poem is bringing all these things together. It's the syncretic effect that is so powerful: the image, the sound, the voice, the gesture, form, cadence. You've really got to have most of those things at once to have good poetry. The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define — and we like it that way. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it. But we know it. When somebody says, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" we know they're starting to talk poetry. And my test for poetry is related to that: it's in its memorability. We remember things both for the way they sound and what they say, and it's impossible to separate these two things. If a poem is not memorable, if you don't want to repeat it, if you don't want to say it out loud, then there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

CQ: You grew up not far at all from a sort of headquarters for the deconstruction of metric. At Black Mountain College Charles Olson led an attack on traditional approaches to poetry, to meter. Do you have any response to Olson's program for Open Field and what it did to American poetry?

RM: Well, the Black Mountain poet I like most is Creeley, the early Creeley. Those early poems by Creeley seem very lyrical and very traditional, very rhyming and with a lot of voice and character in them.

But the poetics of Black Mountain I never quite understood. I'm not sure I ever understood what Projective Verse was or composition by field. In many ways I suspect it was just an extension of Modernism, which I think is one of the myths of academia — that there was such a thing as Modernism and Postmodernism.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, particularly avant-garde poetry: the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new. It's the newness in conjunction with oldness that makes it interesting. And 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. So I feel personally that avant-garde poetry is almost a contradiction in terms. Though we have the sense of the originality of a new poet, of a great poet, it's that sense of originality doing very old things that is most interesting.

After all, we have all these other forms that are very contemporary and modern. The young people have MTV and rock and roll music. Why would they go to read poetry? What is it that poetry can give them that they don't get anywhere else? And it's partly the authority, this other thing that is very hard to name. Poetry belongs to the Stone Age, to a pre-literate culture. It's an oral/aural thing. It awakens in us kinds of perception that go back to those times, to pre-literate times, certainly to pre-media times, pre-print times. And if poetry loses that, then in a sense it's lost what makes it poetry.

That's a roundabout answer to your question. But if you get too far from a metrical tradition in poetry you have lost an essence of poetry in English, I suspect. Someone like Hopkins stretched it about as far as it could be stretched, or Whitman, and that stretching worked because it was stretching away from a very well understood common norm. Something like sprung rhythm doesn't mean anything to people who don't have a firm sense of iambic pentameter and traditional metrics.

CQ: I remember somewhere you say you don't like talking about poetry, that you don't like interviews. But you seem very adept at it.

RM: I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think. One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of western North Carolina, from being unemployed and working part time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person. Graduate students, professors, everybody was talking about writing, and it really changed my poetry. That was one of the watersheds you were talking about earlier.

CQ: With The Carolina Quarterly nearing its fiftieth anniversary, I wonder if you would share whatever thoughts you may have about the role little magazines play for poets today.

RM: The Carolina Quarterly was an important part of my literary education. Working with the magazine, and being published in the magazine, encouraged me in my early fiction writing, and later with my poetry writing. Little magazines and small presses are crucial for young poets and short story writers. They are where the action is, and always have been. And they will be even more important in the future, in the world of blockbuster publishing. Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

I'm very pleased that the Quarterly has lasted fifty years, and hope it stays around another fifty. It is one of the glories of UNC-Chapel Hill, and the state of North Carolina.

[Robert Morgan was interviewed by Robert West.]

Copyright © 1997 by The Carolina Quarterly.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.