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I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

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
Art
Littles
Distinguishes
Little
Verse
Writing
Verses
Thing
Consider
Think
Literature
Thinking
Comes
Write

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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.
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It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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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Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
Howard Nemerov
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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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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.
Howard Nemerov
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov