Howard Nemerov Quotes

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

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.

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.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

I have become a gate
To the ruined city, dry, / Indestructible by fire.

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.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

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.

A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
And M takes mustard, N drives to town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
Who happens, just now to remember A
Peeling an apple somewhere far away.

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

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

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.

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.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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

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

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.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Children, to be illustrious is sad.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

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.

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