Annie Dillard writes that Morgan's poems “are strong and full of carefully controlled feeling. They are tender and precise evocations of the moral and sensory life of man.”
Michael Waters, editor of Contemporary American Poetry, calls him, "One of our finest poets."
Reviewing his recent collection Archives of the Air, Grace Cavalieri comments: "What a beautiful endeavor Morgan's life is, expanding our vision with colorful masterful work. Poetry that is of service."
“History, dreams, aging, death, and nature’s power merge in this collection toward an expression of a lifetime’s wisdom in the controlled voice of a poetic master. Gentle humour, amusing anecdote, and slant rhyme keep things light enough not to overwhelm. This is a book to return to again and again.”—Dawn Macdonald reviewing The Hungers of the World in The Northern Review
* * * * * *
Originally from New York, John Morgan moved with his family to Fairbanks in 1976, to direct the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. In 1982, he and his wife Nancy built a house overlooking the Tanana River with a long view south to the Alaska Range. Morgan has written a series of poems, "Above the Tanana," which feature that view as it changes month by month through the seasons.
THE HUNGERS OF THE WORLD: NEW AND COLLECTED LATER POEMS recently joined its companion volume, THE MOVING OUT: COLLECTED EARLY POEMS, published in 2019, to provide a comprehensive gathering of Morgan’s work. The two books are published by the distinguished Irish press Salmon Poetry and reprint all the poems from Morgan’s six previous volumes, as well as a substantial number of new poems. Work included has previously appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The North American Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals, as well as in in more than two dozen anthologies.
Morgan’s family feature prominently in his work. There are love poems for his wife and a 24 poem sequence, Spells and Auguries, which deals with the illness of one of his sons, Ben, who contracted epilepsy following a bout of encephalitis.
Morgan's long poem River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir was originally published by the University Press with artwork by Kesler Woodward and is reprinted in THE HUNGERS OF THE WORLD. This poem takes the reader on an adventurous raft trip down the Copper River in southcentral Alaska, with the Indian mystic poet Kabir as Morgan’s imaginary companion and spiritual guide.
In 2009, Morgan served as the first writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and a number of his poems based on that experience are featured in the National Park Service website, https://home.nps.gov/articles/air-poems-morgan.htm.
Morgan also writes poems that deal with history and the arts. For instance, one dramatic monologue is in the voice of the psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein—a colleague of Freud’s and a lover of Karl Jung’s—who was murdered by the SS during World War II. In another poem, the poet imagines what it would be like to sit for a portrait by Van Gogh.
At Harvard College, Morgan studied with Robert Lowell and won the Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut, Marvin Bell, and Donald Justice and was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. He has also won the Discovery Award of the New York Poetry Center, the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Prize, and first prize in the Carolina Quarterly Poetry Contest, among other awards. In addition he earned a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Rasmuson Fellowship, and was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown.
These days, Morgan and his wife divide their time between Fairbanks and Bellingham, Washington.
