Howard Nemerov

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

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

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

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

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

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.

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.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

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.

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.