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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
Poem
Poetry
Within
Talk
Making
Sometimes
Fidgeting
Kindergarten

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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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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History is where tensions were.
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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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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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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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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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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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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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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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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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