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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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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
Occasionally
Moving
Accident
Comes
Student
Beautiful
Accidents
Firsts
Students
First
Writer
Something
Wonderful
Years
Burst
Really
Literature

More quotes by 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.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme 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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History is where tensions were.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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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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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.
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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 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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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