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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

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
Talk
Making
Sometimes
Fidgeting
Kindergarten
Poem
Poetry
Within

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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History is where tensions were.
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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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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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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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov
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History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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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I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Howard Nemerov
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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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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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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
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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