Quotes from Howard Nemerov

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

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

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

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.

There is in space a small black holeThrough which, say our astronomers,The whole damn thing, the universe,Must one day fall. That will be all.

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

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

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

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.

His lordly darkness decked in filthBearded with weed like a lady's favor,He is a black planet.