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Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Paul Engle

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Paul Engle
Age: 82 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 12
Died: 1991
Died: March 22
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
Cedar Rapids
Iowa
Together
Tough
Boned
Ideas
Ordinary
Blooded
Poet
Delicate
Poetry
Skin
Emotion
Skins
Words
Held
Language
Emotions
Power
Raised
Nerved

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I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
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Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscape, crowded with constant small changes of scene and full of little creeks winding with pools where shiners, crappies and catfish hover.
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Other families bought automobiles we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.
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I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.
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Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.
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The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.
Paul Engle
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The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, finally saddle horses. I grew up around, on, and under horses, fed them, shoveled their manure, emptied the mangers of corncobs.
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When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages.
Paul Engle
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To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.
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Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.
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A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.
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Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.
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Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder.
Paul Engle
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There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as an honorable career, or with his excess of ego about calling himself a writer.
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I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our neighbor with the grease-grimy shirt use the word 'damn' about them?
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The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.
Paul Engle
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Our small ears never had such a workout as on the Fourth of July, hearing not only our own bursting crackers but also those of our friends, and often the boom of homemade cannon shot off by daring boys of 16 years, ready to lose a hand if it blew up.
Paul Engle
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I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'
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Human life is too difficult for people.
Paul Engle