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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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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
Built
Parlour
Short
Favours
Amount
Reversal
Party
Gadgets
Stories
Favour
Part
Tricks
Recognition
Including
Reversals

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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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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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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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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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I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
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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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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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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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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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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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.
Howard Nemerov