12
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“MusicTHE OF
Spheres ” HEARD AS
“world was opening onto world ”
An In ter vi e w w i t h Rober t M organ
by Rebecca Godwin
Robert Morgan calls Thomas Wolfe the “presiding genius of North Carolina literature.”1 At least at first glance, Wolfe’s urgent outpouring of words in manuscripts thousands of pages long contrasts with Morgan’s own tightly controlled language.In both prose and poetry, this North Carolina native focuses on plain style, with concise, unadorned diction providing easy access to universal mysteries and truths. But in reality, Morgan’s own outpouring of words rivals Wolfe’s: the artist born forty-four years after his predecessor has simply divided his thousands of pages among genres. Morgan has now added drama to his list of literary achievements in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In 2014, his play Homemade Yankees won the John Cullum Civil War Playwriting Competition sponsored by the East Tennessee Civil War Alliance and the University of Tennessee. Despite stretching to master new forms, Morgan has never neglected the genre in which he started. Since Zirconia Poems appeared in 1969, Morgan has published poetry collections at a steady pace, winning acclaim for lucid lines capturing human history as well as the fascinating movement of nature’s cycles that he saw as a child on his Green River mountain farm. Among the admirers of his poetry is Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who included two of Morgan’s poems, “Bellrope” and “Honey,” among the three hundred that he selected for A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, published by Harcourt in 1996. This honor from one of the world’s most respected poets confirms the excellence of Morgan’s craft. His attention to line pulls us to explore with him the meaning of the smallest and the largest facts of existence, as illustrated in “Coriolis Effect,” which appears in his PHOTOGRAPH BY TERHUNE PHOTOGRAPHY
“I wanted to write a symphony or oratorio as grand as the Cicero Mountain across the river from our house. . . . When I discovered that I lacked sufficient talent for music, I turned to the next best thing, poetry, music in language.”
RIGHT Robert Morgan giving the
Thomas Wolfe Prize lecture, Chapel Hill, NC, 2 Oct. 2008
1
This quotation is from Rebecca Godwin’s interview with Robert Morgan, which follows. The interview was conducted via email in August 2016. It has been only slightly edited for clarity and style.