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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. "

Howard Nemerov

Freedom

Bible

You

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

" 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. "

" 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

Argument

Hope

" A chronicle is very different from history proper. "

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

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

" A lot happens by accident in poetry. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

Telling

Poem

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

Howard Nemerov

Ugly

Even

" I have a plot, but not much happens. "

" 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

Write

Think

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

" I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "