Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerovwas an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 February 1920
CountryUnited States of America
war science religion
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.
writing paper firsts
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.
party stories gadgets
Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
sex thinking mind
We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.
tension
History is where tensions were.
poetic verses
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.
long over-you stories
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
beautiful moving years
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.
thinking innovation literature
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.
nice two giving
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.
responsibility government promise
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.
time children war
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.
summer august air
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.
poetry fidgeting sometimes
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.