Paul Engle
Paul Engle
Paul Engle, noted American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is perhaps best remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as founder of the International Writing Program, both at the University of Iowa...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 October 1908
CountryUnited States of America
children iowa church-bells
Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.
grief delight pages
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
horse children air
A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.
christmas mother memories
The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.
horse house automobile
Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.
horse father firsts
The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, finally saddle horses. I grew up around, on, and under horses, fed them, shoveled their manure, emptied the mangers of corncobs.
nuts cake black
All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.
vision bills paid
Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.
boys knives terrible
I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.
fire tinder
Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder.
reading-poetry ordinary tough-skin
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the "N th" power.
writing college missing
But maybe it's up the hills or under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
way rooms abundance
To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.
writing littles wanted
I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.