Rita Dove Quotes

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

- Rita Dove

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

- Rita Dove

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

- Rita Dove

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

- Rita Dove

Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.

- Rita Dove

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

- Rita Dove

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

- Rita Dove

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

- Rita Dove

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

- Rita Dove

My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

It makes me furious to hear haters of all skin colors - especially Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists - deride other people because of their different beliefs and lifestyles.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

- Rita Dove

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

- Rita Dove

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.

- Rita Dove

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

- Rita Dove

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!

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.

- Rita Dove

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

- Rita Dove

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

- Rita Dove

For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

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

- Rita Dove

Libraries are where it all begins.

- Rita Dove

One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits.

- Rita Dove

I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.

- Rita Dove

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.

- Rita Dove

I'm a night person. My best times are midnight to six, actually.

- Rita Dove

What writing does is to reveal.

- Rita Dove