Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was United States Poet Laureate on two separate occasions: from 1963 to 1964, and from 1988 to 1990. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus.
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Life and career
Born in New York City, his parents were David and Gertrude (Russek) Nemerov. His younger sister was the photographer Diane Arbus. The elder Nemerov's talents and interests extended to art connoisseurship, painting, and philanthropy — talents and interests undoubtedly influential upon his son. Young Howard was raised in a sophisticated New York City environment where he attended the Society for Ethical Culture's Fieldston School. Graduated in 1937 as an outstanding student and second string team football fullback, he commenced studies at Harvard University where, in 1940, he was Bowdoin Essayist and he received bachelor's degree at this university. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot, first in the Royal Canadian Air Force and later the U. S. Army Air Forces. He married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book.
Nemerov then began teaching, first at Hamilton College and later at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and finally Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death in 1991. Nemerov's numerous collections of poetry include Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press, 1991); The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize; The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968); Mirrors and Windows (1958); The Salt Garden (1955); and The Image of the Law (1947). His novels have also been commended; they include The Homecoming Game (1957), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954), and The Melodramatists (1949).
Nemerov received many awards and honors, among them fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the first Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. He served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1963 and 1964, as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets beginning in 1976, and as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990. In 1990 he was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City, Missouri.
Poetry
Nemerov's work is formalist. He has written almost exclusively in fixed forms and meter. While he is known for his meticulousness and refined technique, his work also has a reputation for being witty and playful. He is compared to John Hollander, Philip Larkin, and Richard Wilbur.
"A Primer for the Daily Round" is his most frequently anthologized poem, and highly representative of Nemerov's poetic style. It is an archetypal Elizabethan sonnet, demonstrative of the prosodic creativity for which Nemerov is famous.
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- "A Primer for the Daily Round"
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- A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
- C telephones to D, who has a hand
- On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
- For H's grave, I do not understand
- But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
- While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
- And M takes mustard, N drives into town,
- O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
- R lies to S, but happens to be heard
- By T, who tells U not to fire V
- For having to give W the word
- That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
- Who happens just now to remember A
- Peeling an apple somewhere far away.
Bibliography
Poetry
- The Image of the Law (1947)
- The Salt Garden (1955)
- Mirrors and Windows (1958)
- The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968)
- The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977)
- Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (1991)
Prose
- The Melodramatists (1949)
- Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954)
- The Homecoming Game (1957)