Quotes from 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.

The world is full of mostly invisible things,And there is no way but putting the mind's eye,Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,Things like the square root of EverestOr how many times Byron goes into Texas,Or whether the law of the excluded middleApplies west of the Rockies.

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

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.

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

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

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

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

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

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

Poetry is a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry" Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn't tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man thought bitterly about primitive simplicity and decadence, and how he had been ruined by civilization and forced by circumstances to drink and smoke and sit up all night inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and could no longer afford a savagery whether noble or not;

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

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 would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.