Paul Engle
Paul Engle
Paul Engle, noted American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is perhaps best remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as founder of the International Writing Program, both at the University of Iowa...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 October 1908
CountryUnited States of America
horse survival age
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.
vanity drug taste
You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.
writing thinking water
Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
art school gone
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.
summer philosophy vacation
For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
children iowa church-bells
Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.
country small-changes iowa
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.
horse children air
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.
suicide battle tragedy
When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages.
way rooms abundance
To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.
love cities voice
All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.
christmas mother memories
The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.
writing rewriting
Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.
country past hands
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!