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History is where tensions were.

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
Tension
History
Tensions

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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 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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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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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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 sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov