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I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

- Paul Engle
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Paul Engle
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Poetry
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There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as an honorable career, or with his excess of ego about calling himself a writer.

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.

Our small ears never had such a workout as on the Fourth of July, hearing not only our own bursting crackers but also those of our friends, and often the boom of homemade cannon shot off by daring boys of 16 years, ready to lose a hand if it blew up.

I can still remember the feel in my hand of that most wonderful American coin ever minted, a nickel with a buffalo on one side and the head of an Indian on the other. That nickel was a daily proof of our country's past. Bring it back!

Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscape, crowded with constant small changes of scene and full of little creeks winding with pools where shiners, crappies and catfish hover.

When I took over the Writers' Workshop, it was one little class and there were eight students. All of them, brilliantly untalented... I had an absolute vision after the first workshop meeting.

I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

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I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.