I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there’s always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
Category Archive: Howard Nemerov
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
We’re not in love with Literature all the time – especially when you have to teach it every day.
The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That’s one of the things you learn not to know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he’s nothing if he doesn’t make out a case.