Grace Cavalieri Get Grace's books @ Amazon.com
The Poet and the
Poem from the
Library of Congress
LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS WEBSITE
ARCHIVED POETS

The Poet and the Poem 2022-23 Series
CLICK THESE NAMES TO HEAR THE PROGRAM

Eduardo C. Corral
Carmen Calatayud

Susana H. Case

Joan K. Selby

Abdul Ali

Kwame Alexander

Diane Wilbon Parks

fahima ife

Nancy Arbuthnot

Majda Gama

Cathy Hailey

Henry Mills

Joseph Fasano

Quique Aviles

Ryler Dustin

David Lehman

Wayne Karlin &
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Remica
Bingham-Risher

Jean Nordhaus

Patrick Bringley

Dr Nishi Chawla

Kendra Kopelke

James Allen Hall

Mike Maggio

Miguel Avero
and Jona Colson

The Poet and the Poem 2024 december magazine podcast

Lee Woodman

Marc Vincenz

Rae Armantrout

Patrick Washington

A. B. Spellman

Cliff Lynn &
Rocky Jones

Judith Bowles

Dennis Maloney

Robert Haywood

The Poet and the Poem 2022-23 Series

Katherine J. Williams

Daniel Pravda

Sally Wen Mao

Evie Shockley

Jennifer Homans

James J. Patterson

The Song In the Room: Six Women Poets

Terence Winch

William Heath

Terry Edmonds

Deanna Nikaido

Hailey Leithauser

Danny Queen

Rachel Pastan

David Keplinger

Jane Clarke

Dr. Tonee Moll

Susan Okie

Truth Thomas

Greg McBride

Edgar Kunz

Andrew Wong &
Lai Fong Wong

Laura Shovan

The Poet and the Poem 2022-23 Series

Eva Brann

Kondwani Fidel

George Ella Lyon

Vailes Shepperd

Miho Kinnas

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Annie Finch

Samuel Peralta

Melvin E. Brown

Stewart Moss

Barbara Quick

Kim B Miller

Barbara Goldberg

Laura Costas

Kira Thurman

Joel Dias Porter

Esperanza Hope Snyder

Pat Valdata

Taylor Johnson

Maria Lisella

John Berry

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Daniel Mark Epstein

Ada Limón

Marita Golden

Avideh Shashaani

Joyce Kornblatt

Mary Morris

Pamela Woolford

Heid E. Erdrich

Remica
Bingham-Risher

W. Luther Jett

Tim Seibles

Shara McCallum

Frank X Walker

Patti (Spady) Ross

Sunu P. Chandy

Kristin Kowalski Ferragut

Merrill Leffler

Hiram Larew

 

The Poet and the Poem 2021-22 Series

Ocean Vuong

Terence Winch

Lenard D. Moore

John Doe

Jerry Ward

Henry Crawford

Didi Menendez

Francisco Aragón

Tom Kirlin

Jona Colson and
Caroline Bock

Jehanne Dubrow

Miles David Moore

Maggie Doherty

Cornelius Eady

Paul Bartlett

Y.S. Fing

Teri Ellen Cross Davis

Sandra Beasley

Fleda Brown

Jeanne Murray Franklin

Rion Amilcar Scott

Jiwon Choi

Lenny DellaRocca

David Keplinger

Sandra Yannone

Willie Perdomo

J.P. Dancing Bear

Anne Harding Woodworth

Richard Harteis
& Tom Veys

Thomas Sayers Ellis

The Poet and the Poem 2020-21 Series

Barbara DeCesare

The Write Blend
Poetry Collective

Pamela Murray Winters

Shirley J. Brewer

Garrett J. Brown

Temple Cone

Lauren K. Alleyne

Doritt Carroll

Yao Hoke Glover III

Meg Eden

George Bilgere

Robert Earl Price
IN CONCERT

Robert Earl Price
Interview

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

Andrew McConnell Stott

Jody Bolz

Dr. Monifa A. Love

Jericho Brown

Jose Padua

Ann Bracken

Jesse N. Alexander

Jeffrey Coleman

Carolyn Joyner

Barbara Quick

Linda Joy Burke

Kim Roberts

Mecca Verdell

John O'Dell

Ned Balbo

Carolyn Forché

The Poet and the Poem 2020 Series

Panna Naik

Joanna Howard

Lisa Vihos

Fatemeh Keshavarz

Steve Leyva

Seema Reza

Judith Farr

Susan Orlean

Nancy Mitchell

celeste doaks

Robert Ertman

Joy Harjo

Natwar Gandhi

Mervyn Taylor

Jane Clarke

Rob Richmond

The Poet and the Poem 2019 Series

Dr. Xuhua Liang

Chad Frame

Erica Wright

David Gewanter

Wendy Lesser

Marcus Jackson

Michael Lally

Nin Andrews

Linda Pastan

Kyle Dargan

Virginia Smith

Kim Roberts

Abhay K.

Geraldine Connolly

Bob Hicok

George Bilgere

Jeannine M. Pitas

Jorie Graham

Lesley Nneka Arimah

Poets Commemorate China's Nanking Massacre

Arielle Saiber

The Poet and the Poem 2018 Series

Zeina Hashem Beck

Sherwin Bitsui

Linda Rodriguez
George Wallace
Bojan Louis
Margo Jefferson
Anna Lawton
Lauren Camp
Diane Wilbon Parks
Rachel Corbett
Patrick Washington
Mike Maggio
Holly Bass
Terry Blackhawk
Frank X Walker
Shauna Morgan
Tracy K Smith
Matthew Hittinger
Platos Symposium
Fleda Brown
Eli Gottlieb
Reuben Jackson
Kevin Gordon
Emily Fragos
Sandra Evans Falconer
The Poet & the Poem 2017 Featured Poets for the 40th Anneversary
CLICK THESE NAMES TO HEAR THE PROGRAM
The Literary Review
Fairleigh Dickinson University
Harteis' Appreciation of Cavalieri's "Other Voices, Other Lives."
Jim Reese
Mark McMorris
E. Ethelbert Miller
Collective Voices
Elizabeth Hazen
Judith McCombs
Joseph Ross
Hayes Davis
Indran Amirthanayagam
Evie Shockley
Dai Sil Kim-Gibson
Barbara Goldberg
Nancy Carlson
Hope Snyder
Laura Shovan
Poems
Father
I Gave You My Work, Gilbert
Don't Undersell Yourself
January
You Can't Start The Spiritual Journey
The Protest
Going South
Two by Two
This Is
Helpmates
Interviews
Washington Independant Review
Danmurano.com
Interviews
Podcast from WPFW-FM
ON THE MARGIN
Interview
"The Man Who Got Away"
Geoffrey Himes
Interview
The December
Interview
A Review by
Sonja James
Review of Wicked Stage
by Daniela Gioseff
Fund for the Future of Children "Emerging Voices in Poetry"
Interviews
Interviews with
U.S. Poets Laureate
Interviews with Significant Poets
Currency of the Heart
An Interview with Grace Cavalieri
Scene4 Magazine
Grace Cavalieri's book and theater reviews at The Montserrat Review
Articles
Tapes and Books
Pinecrest Rest Haven Audio Tape
WPFW 89.3FM Poetry Anthology
Ordering
Information

© 2024 Grace Cavalieri

Howard Nemerov

Howard and Grace

THE POET AND THE POEM
Recorded at the Library of Congress with Howard Nemerov, the third Poet Laureate of the U.S. October 1988

A CONVERSATION WITH HOWARD NEMEROV
Howard Nemerov (1920 - 1991)

Grace:
Howard Nemerov was the third Poet Laureate of the United States. At the time of this interview he was working on his 14th volume of poetry. He is the author of three novels, two collections of short stories and has received every top award including the Pulitzer in' 78. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished University Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. This interview took place the day of Mr. Nemerov's inauguration as Laureate. It was broadcast nationwide on satellite to public radio stations.

Grace:
I see you have a new manuscript in your hands. Do you like these new poems?

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

Grace:
I am impressed because you always seem to remember all the poems you've ever written.

Howard:
Well, I remember that I've written them but I've never memorized many of them.

Grace:
This is the year of a presidential election so let's talk about whether history can tell us where we're going in our poetry. And can we read a poem and tell where we're headed?

Howard:
Can't be done. 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.

Grace:
And the fact that it's sequential, and chronicles things far different from the way the poet views the world.

Howard:
Yes, and a chronicle is very different from history proper. 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.

Grace:
As to the moral awareness of our times, is the poet better equipped than the historian to handle the meanings of great events

Howard:
Well we wouldn't want to do without either

Grace:
Looking at your new manuscript, I see some poems are very short in length. And in the past you've written four poems. Are these thoughts which jell into a poem

Howard:
Well once in awhile you have a thought and you rhyme it but mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably one from the there. In my poem POETICS, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it

Grace:
That poem is a good description of your process . . . a story . . . a disappointment . . . a joke

Howard:
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. When Robert Frost was alive I was known as the other new England poet which is to be barely known at all and after Robert and I became friends, and after he died, I wrote a poem about a couple of maple trees I'd walked under every Autumn. They come in the last line. And Robert had always said you mustn't think of the last line first or it's only a fake poem and not a real one and while I'm inclined to agree I make my own exceptions. I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out and it wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem and the poem never arrived at it properly but finally I think I got it in the poem FOR ROBERT FROST, IN THE AUTUMN, IN VERMONT "now on your turning page/ The lines blaze with a constant light, displayed/ As in the maple's cold and fiery shade."

Grace:
That's in your collected poems

Howard:
Yes somewhere late. I can't remember which book it was

Grace:
As you continue to write, are you grappling with the same concepts as always. I know you've taken on every subject from football to cars, Everything that happens in daily life is in your poetry. And in your plays we get a strong premise of good and evil. You deal with every human element. In your 14th volume of poetry, are you considering new ideas about good and evil

Howard:
I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art is that we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us, and no doubt when we're long gone and out of range people will show that it was our autobiography the whole time and that it was consistent and thematic, and its attitudes can be traced from poem to poem but that doesn't bother us. We hope every one is new. At the same time Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice

Grace:
We'll leave it to the scholars to say whether you're always writing the same poem and when you're doing it differently

Howard:
You'd like for it to be both of course. In my WAR STORIES I tell a little about how I do it except that they're about piloting and poetry. And a lot happens by accident in poetry as you know

Grace:
You have said that the verse and the idea are inseparable so you think in rhythmic tones, perhaps even in meter at this point

Howard:
Well I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier

Grace:
There is a spiritual knowledge in your work, and there is the analytical part of you. How do they divvy up. What is the proportion of the technical and the intellectual to the other

Howard:
I'd be the last person to know or to be trusted on the answer. The two things have never been quite separable for me. I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow instantly the first time through and then if there's something more to occupy the reader, I've been lucky.

Grace:
Because you care that poetry returns to the people

Howard:
Because language cares. Language is remarkable in that, 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 so that the lovers, the commonwealth, the economy, they all get mixed into the act in a very this term must come from cooking-- in a very "meddled" way

Grace:
Our last work is not written as long as we have that kind of diffuse language which can't be captured. You have always cared very much that your reader has something to read beyond just your thoughts. You've always had a story line a narrative poet

Howard:
Well my narratives tend to be ones in which nothing much happens like the later Henry James

Grace:
We didn't say you had to have a plot

Howard:
Oh I have a plot but not much happens

Grace:
Are there any poetry prizes you have not received

Howard:
A lot. I'm sitting waiting with my hands out. I don't know what's taking them so long except for the unfortunate circumstances that there are other poets. Henry James advises the author to be generous and delicate and pursue the prize. He meant art. There are so many who are not generous or delicate but make up for it triply by pursuing the prizes. My poem FELLOWSHIP in WAR STORIES talks about this G: I've spoken to you about my startled discovery of your plays ENDOR and CAIN. I won't accept your talk of them being visited upon you and channeled through your arm. Playwrighting dramatic literature is a very different process from the charged writing of the poem. Tell me about that moment of inspiration. Let us take Cain. Had you been thinking about this for a long time.

Howard:
I'd been thinking about it and not doing anything about it. I guess I read Lord Byron's little play about Cain and said 'Oh Dear, that's not the way to do it.'

Grace:
And ENDOR

Howard:
ENDOR was commissioned by the Union Theological Seminary in New York and I had that story about Saul in mind. 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.

Grace:
You certainly got new psychological action from Cain and Abel and the mother. The characters were doing things that had not been covered before.

Howard:
Jim Dickey told me once that he found the last part of the Cane play more moving than anything in Shakespeare. That was a nice thing for him to say, though I don't believe it

Grace:
Those two plays are little discussed exquisite pieces of writing. I wonder how they are on the stage

Howard:
They work out pretty good. Although a reputable actress said (of Cain) that I didn't understand people That these weren't real people. I said "Thank God For That!"

Grace:
These plays are in THE COLLECTED POEMS and originally

Howard:
About 1962 THE NEXT ROOM OF THE DREAM

Grace:
I suggest that we do not know Howard Nemerov until we know these plays. I also want to talk about the humor in your poetry

Howard:
When I was starting to write the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. I got, of course, the idea that what you were supposed to do was be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times but civilization has ended so many times during my brief term on earth that I got a little bored with the theme and in old age I concluded that the model was really Mother Goose, and so you can see this in my new poems.

Grace:
How do you keep your energy, teaching through the years

Howard:
We're not in love with Literature all the time when we're teaching especially when you have to teach it every day

Grace:
Do any students surprise you at this point in your life Does anyone come up with a line which really takes your breath away

Howard:
Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving and of course you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful

Grace:
That's necessary in order to keep teaching

Howard:
Well as I say to my graduate students "It's my education. You're coming along for the ride."

Grace:
Who said teaching was talking for an hour

Howard:
That was Ezra Pound. He said a teacher is a person who must talk for an hour. My definition came up with a friend. I said "Did I tell you my new definition of a teacher?" He said 'no.' I said "A teacher is a person who never says anything once." He said 'Oh yes I remember you told me that last week.'

Grace:
What is the title of this new manuscript you're holding

Howard:
There's a picture by my sister, Diane Arbus, called "A Castle in Disneyland" and I think I like that title

Grace:
This will be a very good book

Howard:
We have a long way to go 20 or 30 more poems

Grace:
How long does it take Howard Nemerov to write twenty poems

Howard:
When it comes, it comes in a couple of months. Then it might not come for a couple of years thereafter. Some people do it slow and steady but when it comes to me to do it, it comes very rapidly with long sterile periods in between

Grace:
In your new poems you seem to take a new philosophical position

Howard:
People have accused me of being so rough on Christmas and Santa Claus and conventional beliefs I've started to set the record straight on the other side

Grace:
I would say that in some of your early poems you would argue your way into Heaven. You were so tough with God

Howard:
I still am. Somebody asked me 'Do you believe in God now' I said "No, but I talk to him much more than I used to."

Grace:
Tell us about your inaugural poem for the upcoming election

Howard:
Well I don't think either candidate is going to like it

Grace:
If asked to read it officially, surely you'd have to find something to say which was complimentary

Howard:
I don't see why

Grace:
You'll give poets a bad name

Howard:
No I'm going to give presidents a bad name. These guys have been clanging each other for three months. Do we have to get all reverent suddenly?

Grace:
I think you give the impression of being very much of the physical world, writing about current events but I want to touch on the fact that your writing is very mystical and you don't admit this often. You don't admit communicating with the other worlds but you do

Howard:
Well the spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me tether so it's fairly even. As it's said if you talk to God it's prayer. If God talks to you it's paranoia an early 20th century American folksaying

Grace:
Have you read every poem you've ever written publicly

Howard:
You get stuck in a cycle where you tend to read some more than others

Grace:
I am always interested in your sense of security about your ideas although you change them often. When I read your essays I am taken with the sound of self confidence. Where does that come from... a secure childhood? not looking back?

Howard:
Probably ignorance. When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do

Grace:
But you so often take on the opposite view especially from that of the critics

Howard:
That?s all a part of the game, isn't it. Howard Nemerov and Grace Cavalieri Howard Nemerov and Grace Cavalieri THE POET AND THE POEM Recorded at the Library of Congress with Howard Nemerov, the third Poet Laureate of the U.S. October 1988 A CONVERSATION WITH HOWARD NEMEROV Howard Nemerov (1920 - 1991) Grace Cavalieri: Howard Nemerov was the third Poet Laureate of the United States. At the time of this interview he was working on his 14th volume of poetry. He is the author of three novels, two collections of short stories and has received every top award including the Pulitzer in' 78. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished University Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. This interview took place the day of Mr. Nemerov's inauguration as Laureate. It was broadcast nationwide on satellite to public radio stations. Grace Cavalieri: I see you have a new manuscript in your hands. Do you like these new poems Howard Nemerov: I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

Grace:
I am impressed because you always seem to remember all the poems you've ever written.

Howard:
Well, I remember that I've written them but I've never memorized many of them.

Grace:
This is the year of a presidential election so let's talk about whether history can tell us where we're going in our poetry. And can we read a poem and tell where we're headed?

Howard:
Can't be done. 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.

Grace:
And the fact that it's sequential, and chronicles things far different from the way the poet views the world.

Howard:
Yes, and a chronicle is very different from history proper. 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.

Grace:
As to the moral awareness of our times, is the poet better equipped than the historian to handle the meanings of great events

Howard:
Well we wouldn't want to do without either

Grace:
Looking at your new manuscript, I see some poems are very short in length. And in the past you've written four poems. Are these thoughts which jell into a poem

Howard:
Well once in awhile you have a thought and you rhyme it but mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably one from the there. In my poem POETICS, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it

Grace:
That poem is a good description of your process . . . a story . . . a disappointment . . . a joke

Howard:
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. When Robert Frost was alive I was known as the other new England poet which is to be barely known at all and after Robert and I became friends, and after he died, I wrote a poem about a couple of maple trees I'd walked under every Autumn. They come in the last line. And Robert had always said you mustn't think of the last line first or it's only a fake poem and not a real one and while I'm inclined to agree I make my own exceptions. I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out and it wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem and the poem never arrived at it properly but finally I think I got it in the poem FOR ROBERT FROST, IN THE AUTUMN, IN VERMONT "now on your turning page/ The lines blaze with a constant light, displayed/ As in the maple's cold and fiery shade."

Grace:
That's in your collected poems

Howard:
Yes somewhere late. I can't remember which book it was

Grace:
As you continue to write, are you grappling with the same concepts as always. I know you've taken on every subject from football to cars, Everything that happens in daily life is in your poetry. And in your plays we get a strong premise of good and evil. You deal with every human element. In your 14th volume of poetry, are you considering new ideas about good and evil

Howard:
I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art is that we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us, and no doubt when we're long gone and out of range people will show that it was our autobiography the whole time and that it was consistent and thematic, and its attitudes can be traced from poem to poem but that doesn't bother us. We hope every one is new. At the same time Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice

Grace:
We'll leave it to the scholars to say whether you're always writing the same poem and when you're doing it differently

Howard:
You'd like for it to be both of course. In my WAR STORIES I tell a little about how I do it except that they're about piloting and poetry. And a lot happens by accident in poetry as you know

Grace:
You have said that the verse and the idea are inseparable so you think in rhythmic tones, perhaps even in meter at this point

Howard:
Well I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier

Grace:
There is a spiritual knowledge in your work, and there is the analytical part of you. How do they divvy up. What is the proportion of the technical and the intellectual to the other

Howard:
I'd be the last person to know or to be trusted on the answer. The two things have never been quite separable for me. I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow instantly the first time through and then if there's something more to occupy the reader, I've been lucky.

Grace:
Because you care that poetry returns to the people

Howard:
Because language cares. Language is remarkable in that, 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 so that the lovers, the commonwealth, the economy, they all get mixed into the act in a very this term must come from cooking-- in a very "meddled" way

Grace:
Our last work is not written as long as we have that kind of diffuse language which can't be captured. You have always cared very much that your reader has something to read beyond just your thoughts. You've always had a story line a narrative poet

Howard:
Well my narratives tend to be ones in which nothing much happens like the later Henry James

Grace:
We didn't say you had to have a plot

Howard:
Oh I have a plot but not much happens

Grace:
Are there any poetry prizes you have not received

Howard:
A lot. I'm sitting waiting with my hands out. I don't know what's taking them so long except for the unfortunate circumstances that there are other poets. Henry James advises the author to be generous and delicate and pursue the prize. He meant art. There are so many who are not generous or delicate but make up for it triply by pursuing the prizes. My poem FELLOWSHIP in WAR STORIES talks about this G: I've spoken to you about my startled discovery of your plays ENDOR and CAIN. I won't accept your talk of them being visited upon you and channeled through your arm. Playwrighting dramatic literature is a very different process from the charged writing of the poem. Tell me about that moment of inspiration. Let us take Cain. Had you been thinking about this for a long time.

Howard:
I'd been thinking about it and not doing anything about it. I guess I read Lord Byron's little play about Cain and said 'Oh Dear, that's not the way to do it.'

Grace:
And ENDOR

Howard:
ENDOR was commissioned by the Union Theological Seminary in New York and I had that story about Saul in mind. 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.

Grace:
You certainly got new psychological action from Cain and Abel and the mother. The characters were doing things that had not been covered before.

Howard:
Jim Dickey told me once that he found the last part of the Cane play more moving than anything in Shakespeare. That was a nice thing for him to say, though I don't believe it

Grace:
Those two plays are little discussed exquisite pieces of writing. I wonder how they are on the stage

Howard:
They work out pretty good. Although a reputable actress said (of Cain) that I didn't understand people That these weren't real people. I said "Thank God For That!"

Grace:
These plays are in THE COLLECTED POEMS and originally

Howard:
About 1962 THE NEXT ROOM OF THE DREAM

Grace:
I suggest that we do not know Howard Nemerov until we know these plays. I also want to talk about the humor in your poetry

Howard:
When I was starting to write the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. I got, of course, the idea that what you were supposed to do was be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times but civilization has ended so many times during my brief term on earth that I got a little bored with the theme and in old age I concluded that the model was really Mother Goose, and so you can see this in my new poems.

Grace:
How do you keep your energy, teaching through the years

Howard:
We're not in love with Literature all the time when we're teaching especially when you have to teach it every day

Grace:
Do any students surprise you at this point in your life Does anyone come up with a line which really takes your breath away

Howard:
Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving and of course you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful

Grace:
That's necessary in order to keep teaching

Howard:
Well as I say to my graduate students "It's my education. You're coming along for the ride."

Grace:
Who said teaching was talking for an hour

Howard:
That was Ezra Pound. He said a teacher is a person who must talk for an hour. My definition came up with a friend. I said "Did I tell you my new definition of a teacher?" He said 'no.' I said "A teacher is a person who never says anything once." He said 'Oh yes I remember you told me that last week.'

Grace:
What is the title of this new manuscript you're holding

Howard:
There's a picture by my sister, Diane Arbus, called "A Castle in Disneyland" and I think I like that title

Grace:
This will be a very good book

Howard:
We have a long way to go 20 or 30 more poems

Grace:
How long does it take Howard Nemerov to write twenty poems

Howard:
When it comes, it comes in a couple of months. Then it might not come for a couple of years thereafter. Some people do it slow and steady but when it comes to me to do it, it comes very rapidly with long sterile periods in between

Grace:
In your new poems you seem to take a new philosophical position

Howard:
People have accused me of being so rough on Christmas and Santa Claus and conventional beliefs I've started to set the record straight on the other side

Grace:
I would say that in some of your early poems you would argue your way into Heaven. You were so tough with God

Howard:
I still am. Somebody asked me 'Do you believe in God now' I said "No, but I talk to him much more than I used to."

Grace:
Tell us about your inaugural poem for the upcoming election

Howard:
Well I don't think either candidate is going to like it

Grace:
If asked to read it officially, surely you'd have to find something to say which was complimentary

Howard:
I don't see why

Grace:
You'll give poets a bad name

Howard:
No I'm going to give presidents a bad name. These guys have been clanging each other for three months. Do we have to get all reverent suddenly?

Grace:
I think you give the impression of being very much of the physical world, writing about current events but I want to touch on the fact that your writing is very mystical and you don't admit this often. You don't admit communicating with the other worlds but you do

Howard:
Well the spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me tether so it's fairly even. As it's said if you talk to God it's prayer. If God talks to you it's paranoia an early 20th century American folksaying

Grace:
Have you read every poem you've ever written publicly

Howard:
You get stuck in a cycle where you tend to read some more than others

Grace:
I am always interested in your sense of security about your ideas although you change them often. When I read your essays I am taken with the sound of self confidence. Where does that come from... a secure childhood? not looking back?

Howard:
Probably ignorance. When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do

Grace:
But you so often take on the opposite view especially from that of the critics

Howard:
That?s all a part of the game, isn't it. Howard Nemerov and Grace Cavalieri Howard Nemerov and Grace Cavalieri THE POET AND THE POEM Recorded at the Library of Congress with Howard Nemerov, the third Poet Laureate of the U.S. October 1988 A CONVERSATION WITH HOWARD NEMEROV Howard Nemerov (1920 - 1991) Grace Cavalieri: Howard Nemerov was the third Poet Laureate of the United States. At the time of this interview he was working on his 14th volume of poetry. He is the author of three novels, two collections of short stories and has received every top award including the Pulitzer in' 78. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished University Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. This interview took place the day of Mr. Nemerov's inauguration as Laureate. It was broadcast nationwide on satellite to public radio stations. Grace Cavalieri: I see you have a new manuscript in your hands. Do you like these new poems Howard Nemerov: I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

Grace:
I am impressed because you always seem to remember all the poems you've ever written.

Howard:
Well, I remember that I've written them but I've never memorized many of them.

Grace:
This is the year of a presidential election so let's talk about whether history can tell us where we're going in our poetry. And can we read a poem and tell where we're headed?

Howard:
Can't be done. 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.

Grace:
And the fact that it's sequential, and chronicles things far different from the way the poet views the world.

Howard:
Yes, and a chronicle is very different from history proper. 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.

Grace:
As to the moral awareness of our times, is the poet better equipped than the historian to handle the meanings of great events

Howard:
Well we wouldn't want to do without either

Grace:
Looking at your new manuscript, I see some poems are very short in length. And in the past you've written four poems. Are these thoughts which jell into a poem

Howard:
Well once in awhile you have a thought and you rhyme it but mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably one from the there. In my poem POETICS, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it

Grace:
That poem is a good description of your process . . . a story . . . a disappointment . . . a joke

Howard:
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. When Robert Frost was alive I was known as the other new England poet which is to be barely known at all and after Robert and I became friends, and after he died, I wrote a poem about a couple of maple trees I'd walked under every Autumn. They come in the last line. And Robert had always said you mustn't think of the last line first or it's only a fake poem and not a real one and while I'm inclined to agree I make my own exceptions. I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out and it wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem and the poem never arrived at it properly but finally I think I got it in the poem FOR ROBERT FROST, IN THE AUTUMN, IN VERMONT "now on your turning page/ The lines blaze with a constant light, displayed/ As in the maple's cold and fiery shade."

Grace:
That's in your collected poems

Howard:
Yes somewhere late. I can't remember which book it was

Grace:
As you continue to write, are you grappling with the same concepts as always. I know you've taken on every subject from football to cars, Everything that happens in daily life is in your poetry. And in your plays we get a strong premise of good and evil. You deal with every human element. In your 14th volume of poetry, are you considering new ideas about good and evil

Howard:
I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art is that we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us, and no doubt when we're long gone and out of range people will show that it was our autobiography the whole time and that it was consistent and thematic, and its attitudes can be traced from poem to poem but that doesn't bother us. We hope every one is new. At the same time Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice

Grace:
We'll leave it to the scholars to say whether you're always writing the same poem and when you're doing it differently

Howard:
You'd like for it to be both of course. In my WAR STORIES I tell a little about how I do it except that they're about piloting and poetry. And a lot happens by accident in poetry as you know

Grace:
You have said that the verse and the idea are inseparable so you think in rhythmic tones, perhaps even in meter at this point

Howard:
Well I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier

Grace:
There is a spiritual knowledge in your work, and there is the analytical part of you. How do they divvy up. What is the proportion of the technical and the intellectual to the other

Howard:
I'd be the last person to know or to be trusted on the answer. The two things have never been quite separable for me. I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow instantly the first time through and then if there's something more to occupy the reader, I've been lucky.

Grace:
Because you care that poetry returns to the people

Howard:
Because language cares. Language is remarkable in that, 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 so that the lovers, the commonwealth, the economy, they all get mixed into the act in a very this term must come from cooking-- in a very "meddled" way

Grace:
Our last work is not written as long as we have that kind of diffuse language which can't be captured. You have always cared very much that your reader has something to read beyond just your thoughts. You've always had a story line a narrative poet

Howard:
Well my narratives tend to be ones in which nothing much happens like the later Henry James

Grace:
We didn't say you had to have a plot

Howard:
Oh I have a plot but not much happens

Grace:
Are there any poetry prizes you have not received

Howard:
A lot. I'm sitting waiting with my hands out. I don't know what's taking them so long except for the unfortunate circumstances that there are other poets. Henry James advises the author to be generous and delicate and pursue the prize. He meant art. There are so many who are not generous or delicate but make up for it triply by pursuing the prizes. My poem FELLOWSHIP in WAR STORIES talks about this G: I've spoken to you about my startled discovery of your plays ENDOR and CAIN. I won't accept your talk of them being visited upon you and channeled through your arm. Playwrighting dramatic literature is a very different process from the charged writing of the poem. Tell me about that moment of inspiration. Let us take Cain. Had you been thinking about this for a long time.

Howard:
I'd been thinking about it and not doing anything about it. I guess I read Lord Byron's little play about Cain and said 'Oh Dear, that's not the way to do it.'

Grace:
And ENDOR

Howard:
ENDOR was commissioned by the Union Theological Seminary in New York and I had that story about Saul in mind. 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.

Grace:
You certainly got new psychological action from Cain and Abel and the mother. The characters were doing things that had not been covered before.

Howard:
Jim Dickey told me once that he found the last part of the Cane play more moving than anything in Shakespeare. That was a nice thing for him to say, though I don't believe it

Grace:
Those two plays are little discussed exquisite pieces of writing. I wonder how they are on the stage

Howard:
They work out pretty good. Although a reputable actress said (of Cain) that I didn't understand people That these weren't real people. I said "Thank God For That!"

Grace:
These plays are in THE COLLECTED POEMS and originally

Howard:
About 1962 THE NEXT ROOM OF THE DREAM

Grace:
I suggest that we do not know Howard Nemerov until we know these plays. I also want to talk about the humor in your poetry

Howard:
When I was starting to write the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. I got, of course, the idea that what you were supposed to do was be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times but civilization has ended so many times during my brief term on earth that I got a little bored with the theme and in old age I concluded that the model was really Mother Goose, and so you can see this in my new poems.

Grace:
How do you keep your energy, teaching through the years

Howard:
We're not in love with Literature all the time when we're teaching especially when you have to teach it every day

Grace:
Do any students surprise you at this point in your life Does anyone come up with a line which really takes your breath away

Howard:
Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving and of course you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful

Grace:
That's necessary in order to keep teaching

Howard:
Well as I say to my graduate students "It's my education. You're coming along for the ride."

Grace:
Who said teaching was talking for an hour

Howard:
That was Ezra Pound. He said a teacher is a person who must talk for an hour. My definition came up with a friend. I said "Did I tell you my new definition of a teacher?" He said 'no.' I said "A teacher is a person who never says anything once." He said 'Oh yes I remember you told me that last week.'

Grace:
What is the title of this new manuscript you're holding

Howard:
There's a picture by my sister, Diane Arbus, called "A Castle in Disneyland" and I think I like that title

Grace:
This will be a very good book

Howard:
We have a long way to go 20 or 30 more poems

Grace:
How long does it take Howard Nemerov to write twenty poems

Howard:
When it comes, it comes in a couple of months. Then it might not come for a couple of years thereafter. Some people do it slow and steady but when it comes to me to do it, it comes very rapidly with long sterile periods in between

Grace:
In your new poems you seem to take a new philosophical position

Howard:
People have accused me of being so rough on Christmas and Santa Claus and conventional beliefs I've started to set the record straight on the other side

Grace:
I would say that in some of your early poems you would argue your way into Heaven. You were so tough with God

Howard:
I still am. Somebody asked me 'Do you believe in God now' I said "No, but I talk to him much more than I used to."

Grace:
Tell us about your inaugural poem for the upcoming election

Howard:
Well I don't think either candidate is going to like it

Grace:
If asked to read it officially, surely you'd have to find something to say which was complimentary

Howard:
I don't see why

Grace:
You'll give poets a bad name

Howard:
No I'm going to give presidents a bad name. These guys have been clanging each other for three months. Do we have to get all reverent suddenly?

Grace:
I think you give the impression of being very much of the physical world, writing about current events but I want to touch on the fact that your writing is very mystical and you don't admit this often. You don't admit communicating with the other worlds but you do

Howard:
Well the spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me tether so it's fairly even. As it's said if you talk to God it's prayer. If God talks to you it's paranoia an early 20th century American folksaying

Grace:
Have you read every poem you've ever written publicly

Howard:
You get stuck in a cycle where you tend to read some more than others

Grace:
I am always interested in your sense of security about your ideas although you change them often. When I read your essays I am taken with the sound of self confidence. Where does that come from... a secure childhood? not looking back?

Howard:
Probably ignorance. When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do

Grace:
But you so often take on the opposite view especially from that of the critics

Howard:
That?s all a part of the game, isn't it.