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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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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
Pages
Iceberg
Literature
Bulk
May
Poems
Way
Appears
Like
Page
Third
Thirds
Surface
Icebergs

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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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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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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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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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've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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 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 I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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