A chronicle is very different from history proper.
Howard Nemerov

A lot happens by accident in poetry.
Howard Nemerov

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
Howard Nemerov

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
Howard Nemerov

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
Howard Nemerov

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Howard Nemerov

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
Howard Nemerov

I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov

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

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.
Howard Nemerov


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.
Howard Nemerov

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov

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.
Howard Nemerov

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.
Howard Nemerov

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov

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.
Howard Nemerov

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
Howard Nemerov

Language cares.
Howard Nemerov

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.
Howard Nemerov