Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

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

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

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

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.

Libraries are where it all begins.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.