Education Quote by Howard Nemerov

A poet admitting confusion sounds like weakness until you notice the quiet swagger in Nemerov's line. "I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore" isn’t a lapse in craft; it’s a veteran’s refusal to let a once-useful label keep pretending it’s a definition. Free verse began as a revolt against inherited meters, then hardened into a genre tag, a workshop default, a marketing convenience. Nemerov punctures that certainty by treating "free verse" as a moving target: free from what, exactly, once every poet has permission to break the rules?

The second sentence is the real blade: "That's one of the things you learn not to know". It flips education on its head. In art, mastery often means acquiring technique and then shedding the need to name, justify, or police it. Nemerov is pointing to a mature, earned ignorance: the kind that comes after you’ve seen too many dogmas rise and fall, too many "isms" turn into costumes.

Subtext: he’s skeptical of literary bureaucracy, of critics and teachers who need stable categories to grade or explain what should stay alive and unruly. Free verse, in this view, is less a form than a posture, and postures get stale. The line also carries a subtle ethic: if you’re truly listening to language, you can’t cling to a fixed definition of freedom. You have to keep re-earning it, poem by poem, without hiding behind the comfort of knowing what you’re doing.