Nemerov, Howard

United States, (1920-1991)

Manners

  1. Prig offered Pig the first chance at dessert,
  2. So Pig reached out and speared the bigger part.
  3.  
  4. “Now that,” cried Prig, “is extremely rude of you!”
  5. Pig, with his mouth full, said, “Wha, wha’ wou’ ‘ou do?”
  6.  
  7. “I would have taken the littler bit,” said Prig.
  8. “Stop kvetching, then it’s what you’ve got,” said Pig.
  9.  
  10. So virtue is its own reward, you see.
  11. And that is all it’s ever going to be.

 Howard Nemerov. The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press (2003).

Bacon & Eggs

  1. The chicken contributes
  2. But the pig gives his all.

Editor’s Note:

While the above Bacon & Eggs is often attributed to Nemerov, I have yet to find any published volume of his poetry or any anthology that definitively makes a connection of this poem to Nemerov.

No less an distinguished researcher than Mark Essig, author of the terrific Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig said this in the “Notes to Prologue” on pg. 262 of his book:

#8     The two-line poem “Bacon & Eggs”: The poem is widely attributed to Howard Nemerov (see, for instance, Kevin Young, The Hungry Ear [New York: Bloomsbury, 2012], 151), but his authorship could not be established with certainty. Author’s e-mail correspondence with Alexander Nemerov, October and November 2014.

Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket

  1. This God of ours, the Great Geometer,
  2. Does something for us here, where He hath put
  3. (if you want to put it that way) things in shape,
  4. Compressing the little lambs into orderly cubes,
  5. Making the roast a decent cylinder,
  6. Fairing the tin ellipsoid of a ham,
  7. Getting the luncheon meat anonymous
  8. In squares and oblongs with all the edges bevelled
  9. Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).
  10.  
  11. Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance
  12. Upon our appetites, and on the bloody
  13. Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,
  14. Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes
  15. Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,
  16. Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives
  17. They come to us holy, in cellophane
  18. Transparencies, in the mystical body,
  19.  
  20. That we may look unflinchingly on death
  21. As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.

 Howard Nemerov. The Blue Swallows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1967).

About the Poet:

Howard Nemerov, United States, (1920– 1991), was a poet, novelist and educator. He served in the US Air Force as a combat pilot during World War II and had a continuing interest in the stars and navigation.

Nemerov 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 two he served two terms as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977) won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Prize.

Nemerov taught college, 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 (1969-1991). [DES-10/19]