Rita Dove Quotes

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.

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

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.

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder-
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one had heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.
(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don't answer to strangers. Stick
with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

Against Self-Pity
It gets you nowhere but deeper into
your own shit
pure misery a luxury
one never learns to enjoy.

The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well ... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world
just the world as you think you know it.

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.

If you can't be free, be a mystery.

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

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

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

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.

If we're going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It's the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

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.

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

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.

Nexus
I wrote stubbornly into the evening.
At the window, a giant praying mantis
rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,
begging vacantly with pale eyes;
and the commas leapt at me like worms
or miniature scythes blackened with age.
the praying mantis screeched louder,
his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.
I walked outside;
the grass hissed at my heels.
Up ahead in the lapping darkness
he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,
a brontosaurus, a poet.

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

Our situation is intolerable, but what's worse
is to sit here and do nothing.

When I was young, I was older than I am today.

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

At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.

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!

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.

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.

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

I was pirouette and flourish,
I was filigree and flame.
How could I count my blessings
when I didn't know their names?

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

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 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.

My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.

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

What writing does is to reveal.

Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.

If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

I tell you, if you feel strange,
strange things will happen to you:
Fallen peacocks on library shelves

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

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

I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.

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.

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.

Listen how they say your name. If they can't say that right, there's no way they're going to know how to treat you proper, neither.

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.

If you cannot be free, be a mystery.

We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.

Don't think you can ever forget her
don't even try
she's not going to budge
no choice but to grant her space
crown her with sky
for she is one of the many
and she is each of us

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.

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.

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.

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.

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

If fucking were graceful,desire an alibi.

Sometimes
a word is found so right it trembles
at the slightest explanation.

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