Nemerov Quotes & Sayings

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even. — Howard Nemerov

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know. — Howard Nemerov

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

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

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. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all. — Howard Nemerov

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. — Howard Nemerov

A chronicle is very different from history proper. — Howard Nemerov

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

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

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

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

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. — Howard Nemerov

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students). — Howard Nemerov

I have a plot, but not much happens. — Howard Nemerov

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

Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals — Howard Nemerov

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

Children, to be illustrious is sad. — 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. — Howard Nemerov

A teacher is a person who never says anything once. — Howard Nemerov

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

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

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. — Howard Nemerov

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept. — Howard Nemerov

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. — Howard Nemerov

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

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

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. — Howard Nemerov

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps. — Billy Collins

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within. — Howard Nemerov

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape 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. — Howard Nemerov

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. — Howard Nemerov

History is where tensions were. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

So Nemerov showed us this picture, which is of Apollo flaying Marcius. You don't think of Apollo as being the sort of person who would skin someone alive. But the story behind it was that there was this guy who was a really great musician, and all the women loved him, and people started saying he was the best musician in the world, so Apollo got jealous and he challenged this guy to a musical dual. They would each play a song and the muses would judge who was the better musician. — Larkin Grimm

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

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

When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road. — Howard Nemerov

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had. — Howard Nemerov

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads. — Howard Nemerov

A lot happens by accident in poetry. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov

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. — Howard Nemerov