Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

Nemerov’s line is a quiet flex: the poem doesn’t just arrive; it shows its seams. “I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem” frames writing as an act worth staging, not hiding. The intent isn’t confession for its own sake but control. By letting the poem narrate its own construction, Nemerov can preempt the reader’s suspicion that lyric feeling is either pure gush or pure trick. He offers the trick openly, then dares you to keep caring.

The subtext is a negotiation of authority. A poem that points at its own gears says: I know you know this is made. It invites you to watch craft happen in real time - revision, doubt, the tug between impulse and form - and it turns those “behind-the-scenes” moments into subject matter. That move can be disarming, even intimate, while also retaining a certain coolness: the poet is present, but not pleading.

Context matters. Mid-20th-century American poetry was pulled between high modernist difficulty, confessional rawness, and a growing skepticism about grand pronouncements. Nemerov, often associated with a wry, formally attentive intelligence, finds a third lane: self-awareness without self-indulgence. Metapoetry becomes his way of keeping lyric honest in an age allergic to sincerity and unimpressed by mystique. The poem becomes a small workshop with the lights on, insisting that artifice isn’t the opposite of truth; it’s one of its methods.