howard nemerov

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application --why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

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The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present --henceforth --the subject to which you are condemned.

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Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose

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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

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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 do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

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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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I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

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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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A lot happens by accident in poetry.

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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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We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

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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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Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

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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 modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

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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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Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

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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've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

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Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

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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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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

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