"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"
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Craft talk usually wants a clean diagram: first you think, then you write, then you revise. Nemerov refuses the schematic. “Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably” is a poet’s quiet heresy against the workshop-industrial fantasy that content can be poured into form like liquid into a mold. He’s pointing to a lived fact of lyric making: meter, line break, and sound aren’t decorative packaging for an idea; they are the engine that generates the idea. In that sense, he’s also defending poetry’s autonomy in a culture that keeps asking it to justify itself in prose.
The second sentence is the slyer move. “In my poem Poetics, it’s as close as I come to telling how I do it” reads like modesty, but it’s really a principled withholding. Nemerov signals that any “method” he could explain would be a counterfeit, because the moment you translate process into instructions, you turn a private act of attention into a public recipe. The self-awareness matters: he knows readers want the backstage pass, and he offers the nearest thing while insisting that the backstage is mostly darkness and habit.
Contextually, this fits a mid-century American poet skeptical of both confession-as-brand and theory-as-credential. Nemerov stakes out a third posture: disciplined, humorous, craft-haunted. The line lands because it treats poetry as thinking in its own medium, not thinking plus ornament.
The second sentence is the slyer move. “In my poem Poetics, it’s as close as I come to telling how I do it” reads like modesty, but it’s really a principled withholding. Nemerov signals that any “method” he could explain would be a counterfeit, because the moment you translate process into instructions, you turn a private act of attention into a public recipe. The self-awareness matters: he knows readers want the backstage pass, and he offers the nearest thing while insisting that the backstage is mostly darkness and habit.
Contextually, this fits a mid-century American poet skeptical of both confession-as-brand and theory-as-credential. Nemerov stakes out a third posture: disciplined, humorous, craft-haunted. The line lands because it treats poetry as thinking in its own medium, not thinking plus ornament.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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