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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

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
Rhyming
Awhile
Rhyme
Literature
Thought

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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.
Howard Nemerov
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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.
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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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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
Howard Nemerov
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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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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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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.
Howard Nemerov
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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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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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.
Howard Nemerov
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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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