American - Poet | February 29, 1920 - July 5, 1991
I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov
HappensPlotMuch
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
ChildrenUglyLikeEvenSquat
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.
MeDoingYouSayTryKid
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.
FreedomBookFreeEarlyNeverFirst
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.
NatureHistoryPoetryThinkLook
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.
ArtThinkWriteLittleUsOne Thing
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
FunnyTalkWouldEasierWere
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.
WorkBeautifulThoughtLineOut
Language cares.
CommunicationLanguageCares
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.
ThoughtPoemCloseComeTellingHow
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.
BeautifulMovingYouStudentKnow
Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
ThoughtYouRhymeOnceAwhile
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