Rita Dove Quotes - Page 4

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.