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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
Poetry
Within
Talk
Making
Sometimes
Fidgeting
Kindergarten
Poem

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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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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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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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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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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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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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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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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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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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History is where tensions were.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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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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