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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Howard Nemerov

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Howard Nemerov
Age: 71 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 29
Died: 1991
Died: July 5
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Kindergarten
Easier
Literature
Talk
Funny
Writing
Iambic
Would
Pentameter
Life
Fidgeting

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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
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I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
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That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
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This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.
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I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
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I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
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