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

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.
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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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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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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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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.
Howard Nemerov
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
Howard Nemerov
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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov
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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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Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
Howard Nemerov
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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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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.
Howard Nemerov