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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.

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
Makes
Rarely
Political
Accomplished
Happens
Poet
Anything
Poetry
Things
Wants
Never
Happen
Literature
Read
Poem

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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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History is where tensions were.
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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 have a plot, but not much happens.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
Howard Nemerov