Rita Dove Quotes

To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings.

I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.

Poetry connects you to yourself, to the self that doesn't know how to talk or negotiate.

I change jobs like drinking water ... And as I grow accustomed to the new flavor of a drink I regard as delicious, yes, vital, something fades, life balks. So I break camp; I shed skins.

I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.

When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.

Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.

I was not interested in doing the plot of Oedipus in blackface. I did wonder, what would these people have been like if they hadn't been in that situation?... One could look at Oedipus, or at my character Augustus, as a cynical schemer who did everything because he was hungry for power. But that's just too easy. I'm more interested in how humans can embody conflicting goals and emotions.

Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?

To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.

I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years - or longer.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about the lack of respect artists got here. In my heart, I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.

All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.

What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

As an African-American, as a woman I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.

There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.

What writing does is to reveal.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer

The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.

My first advice would be to read, read, read, which sounds interesting coming in a digital age, but it's so much easier to listen to a poem than it is to sit down and actually read it and to hear it in your head and that is something that every poet or aspiring poet needs to be able to do, I think to hear it in their head.

If the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920's Harlem let's say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it's really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems.

I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.