Crafting the "Living Voice":

Robert Morgan's Verse and the Poetry of Roots and Place

By David O. Hoffman

In response to his life's influence on his writing, Robert Morgan states in a June 2003 interview:

My favorite authors set their stories in exotic places. . . . All I knew was the little farm I had grown up on in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only gradually did I come to see that I had a treasure of stories picked up from my grandpa and parents, from the region. (Hoffman)

Morgan's observations of the world of his childhood—the world he knew so well—enable him to write of Appalachia in a way like no other. His spare, succinct poems describe common ideas and objects from his home and emphasize keen emotions that are associated. Although a prolific essayist and novelist, Robert Morgan's descriptions and observations portrayed in his poetry are unlike any other, due in large part to the many influences of his childhood home in the North Carolina mountains near Zirconia.

Morgan's poetry may appear very simple at first glance. For example, "Building a Dam," in Red Owl, may seem on first reading to be just that—a poem about building a dam. But looking closely at Morgan’s use of natural images, it is clear that the poem goes much deeper, is much more complex. The process of building the dam relates to the very process of living; both are immensely complex. He begins:

Two ways to make a pond.

Shovel a hole in the gravel under the stream

and let if fill (as it eventually will with silt)

or shovel up just enough mud

and rock to trap

the branch at a narrows (lines 1-6)

A metaphor for living, the poem reveals two approaches to life. The first option is living life to the fullest, with careful planning and a strong foundation, and the second is simply doing "just enough" to get by. Either choice, however, brings about the idea of permanence. In building the dam, "there is the problem of a spillway" (20). Applying this detail to life, there is the problem of losing what you've worked for. Whether completely prepared or not, there is always the chance of loss—certainly, loss of permanence.

Morgan also can take a very unappealing object or a mundane process and turn it into something more meaningful and beautiful. He writes in his collection of essays Good Measure (GM): "I would take the filth and stinky cans and sawdust bags, soot and broken bulbs, and crush the mess into a compact ingot, into a fleshy diamond" (122). Such is Morgan's poetry. A more whimsical version of this idea is found in "Going Barefoot" in Land Diving:

Sure I've seen kids walk up to school

barefoot in the snow and stop

to warm their feet in the branch.

But every year the first of May

regardless of the weather we

took our shoes off religiously

and put tender feet on the new grass.

And even when it came late frost

or chilling rain we never put them on again

until the first of October.

I have walked with a stubbed toe

swollen and runny as a rotten potato

in the dew that gives blood poisoning

to turn the cows out.

By June I ran on callous sandals

down the gravel road

and teased copperheads among the weeds

looking for berries.

A tourist lady once paid a quarter

for her kids to see me skip

along the rocks.

Morgan depicts a painful, yet common situation in the life of a country boy. Whether or not this situation is a desirable way of life, it is still a way of life for many. The lightness of the situation comes as he remembers and concludes not with the pain, but with the lady (possibly a Yankee) paying to watch him run barefoot—almost like a circus act for her. In essence, he turns the difficult situation into a fond memory of his childhood.

An example of Morgan's craft as an imagist can be seen in his poem "Oxbow Lakes" in Topsoil Road. He creates a detailed image of the river rapids and tangles. His repetition of lines details to the reader a sense of the rapids creating a back and forth motion. The form of the poem enables the reader to feel the motion. The second line of each stanza becomes the first line of the next, and the last line becomes the third. For example:

The knots tied by a river

become lost ends as the tangles

and meanders separate, cut off

in the streamline of erosion,

become lost ends as the tangles

silt up in dead lakes, fatten

in the streamline of erosion

old bends not communicating. (lines 1-8)

The poem itself is one long sentence, connected by commas, and the first and last lines are identical. This arrangement furthers the image of the "knots tied by a river." The image suggests the natural propensity of taking the direct route—our own impatience with making our own path. It is very easy to fall into the "current" of life, following the easiest way. However, the winding path continues to repeat itself endlessly. Words like erosion, dead, and lost ends depict a negative connotation of following the crowd. The circular pattern of the poem echoes our circuitous lives

According to an assessment of Morgan’s writing in Contemporary Southern Writers, "Together with his fine sense of craft, his allegiance to his native area gives his writing a quiet power and universality" (qtd. in "Robert Morgan" 2). Further, Morgan himself states: "My ideal was to write poetry accessible to everyone, but tough enough, and rich enough, to reveal something on each successive reading" (qtd. in "Robert Morgan" 3). To accomplish this task, Morgan expounds on the simpler things from his childhood in the Appalachians and Blue Ridge Mountains. He dramatizes, as he says in "Writing the Mountains," "the complexities of the seemingly plain, the sharpness of the everyday, the cruelties of the conventional, the isolation of the rural" (2). Morgan's descriptions can be paralleled to the work of poets like Emerson, who focused on "[seeing] the miraculous in the common" (Lang 20). He looks at the simplicity of nature and his surroundings and engenders them with something greater, in a very clear and sparse narrative method.

An additional foundation for Morgan’s poetry comes from yet another aspect of his life: his family. Storytelling and religion both play an important role in his family life in Appalachia. Morgan's simple answer to the presence of poetry in his personal life is that he "absorbed poetry from the oral tradition in the south." He continues:

I heard a lot of storytelling around the fireplace; I grew up in a community

that was still in some ways in the nineteenth century, and people talked

more than they do now. They told stories, and southerners are particularly

good storytellers. . . . I heard a lot of great preaching, and I grew up in a

very religious family—we read the Bible twice a day. . . so I was exposed

to that very rich Elizabethan rhetoric of the New Testament. (GM 146-47)

These two influences come together in such poems as "The Gift of Tongues," where Morgan depicts the terrifying event of hearing his Pentecostal Holiness father speak in tongues. He describes his father's words as "a voice [he'd] never heard"(GM 152). Although his immediate reaction to this event was clenching his "jaws like pliers, holding in / and savoring the gift of silence," he also embraces such a spiritual moment in the poem "Church Pews" in Red Owl. Although he does not necessarily understand exactly what is going on in the church, he knows that religion and his family represent permanence. He writes:

Under dust's upholstery

the wood itself still has the polish

of an apple,

the work of generations

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The oil from sweating hands

and the rubbing of sweaty cloth

have left a finish

that sparkles

long after paint has cracked (lines 1-4, 8-12)

This church may have lost its brilliance, but still holds a sense of dedication and history. Religion is ever permanent and present in his life. This permanence is mirrored in Morgan's commitment to his family and the deeper values that transcend orthodoxies. As he states in Good Measure, "poetry is in another place. It is the serene white pines after the discomforts of church and society" (113). Morgan may not have fully understood his father's religious tongues and the rest of the world around him, but he found that there really is beauty in and after the discomforts and uneasiness of life.

Regardless of the many diverse influences on Robert Morgan's work, one thing remains constant: home. In his poem "Compass," Morgan states:

One direction, one line of reference,

is all you need to start from

to go anywhere.

And though we don't

the blue sliver

hears

and responds,

aligning with its desire,

to a wind more subtle

than motion. Nervous,

alert,

always remembering

to point home,

a clock with one instant.

Though unsteady as mercury

and constant

only in approximation,

it lays off the horizon, protracting

the possible. (Land Diving)

Robert Morgan will "always [remember] to point home." Home memories are like the permanence of a compass. Like the needle swaying back and forth before pointing home, Morgan's uncertainties of his experience will always guide him back to his roots in Appalachia. As Roger Jones has said in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Robert Morgan is not only one of the most talented and distinct spokesmen for that particular area, its people, and its culture but also one of the most prolific, technically accomplished, and consistently interesting poets in contemporary American writing" (213-214).

Works Cited

Hoffman, David O. "Interview with Robert Morgan, 2003 Writer-in-Residence."

20 June 2003. Online at http://www.shepherd.edu/englweb/morgan/Interview.htm.

Jones, Roger D. "Robert Morgan." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120:

American Poets Since World War II, Third Series. Ed. R.S. Gwynn. Vol. 120.

1992. 213-219.

Lang, John. "Speaking Charmed Syllables: The Two-Fold Vision of Topsoil Road."

Pembroke Magazine. 35 (2003): 16-21.

Morgan, Robert. Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993.

____________. Land Diving. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1976.

____________. Red Owl. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972.

____________. Topsoil Road. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000.

____________. "Writing the Mountains." On line at

http://people.cornell.edu/pages/rrm4/essays/mountains.htm.

"Robert Morgan." Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Research. 2002.

Smith, Rebecca. "The Elemental in The Truest Pleasure and Gap Creek: Nature as

Physical Force and Spiritual Metaphor." Pembroke Magazine. 35 (2003): 37-46.