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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

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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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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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History is where tensions were.
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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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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Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
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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.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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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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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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov