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
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. – 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
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice. – 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
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow’s speed. – 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
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
Robert Frost had always said you mustn’t think of the last line first, or it’s only a fake poem, not a real one. I’m inclined to agree. – 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
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
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
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. – 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
