When I Went Through An Evening With Howard Nemerov

WHEN I WAS TWENTY years of age I went through an evening with Howard Nemerov. He was the main "renowned" writer I had ever met, however I would later discover that he was profoundly disillusioned by what he saw to be an absence of admiration from commentators and different artists. (I once heard Thom Gunn call him a "zombie.") My main recollections are of his awesome avidness to nail down the time and place for his late morning martini, him recounting "Animula" when I let him know I cherished Eliot, and asking me at a certain point—with what I now acknowledge was extraordinary persistence and thoughtfulness—what I was going to do when I graduated soon thereafter. I had no arrangements, no desire sufficiently clear to perceive thusly, no enthusiasm
One must have commitment to be a craftsman, and there's no chance to get of minimizing its expense. Yet at the same time, pretty much as in religious connections, there is a sort of commitment that is, at its heart, escape. Nowadays I am restless with verse that is not saturated with, damaged and transfigured by, the world. By that I don't mean verse that has "social concern" or is careful with its portrayals, yet a verse in which you can feel that the creative energy of the writer has been both charged and berated by a full experience with the world and different lives. An artist like Robert Lowell, who had such a gigantic creative energy for dialect however none at all for other individuals, implies less and less to me as the years
There is unmistakably something in all unique workmanship that won't be made subject to God, on the off chance that we mean by being made "subject to God" a sort of deliberate restriction or willed refusal of the psyche's unconstrained and once in a while unsafe interruptions into, and expansions of, reality. Yet, that is not how that expression should be caught on. Actually we come nearer to reality of the craftsman's connection to holiness in the event that we consider not being made subject to God but rather of being subjected to God—our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered inside the truth of God. Human creative energy is not just our method for connecting with God however God's method for showing himself to us. It takes after that any thought of God that is static is not just sterile but rather, since it attests solitary learning of God and tries to farthest point his being to that information, profane. "God's truth is life," as Patrick Kavanagh says, "even the twisted states of its foulest