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
absolute class eight took vision workshop
When I took over the Writers' Workshop, it was one little class and there were eight students. All of them, brilliantly untalented... I had an absolute vision after the first workshop meeting.
hall louisiana scores state town
I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.
held poet poetry skin together tough
Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
boys knives terrible
I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.
writing littles wanted
I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
vision bills paid
Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.
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.
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.
horse writing years
The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.
horse survival age
I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.
vanity drug taste
You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.
writing thinking water
Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
art school gone
Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.
summer philosophy vacation
For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.