Rita Dove
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Doveis an American poet and author. From 1993 to 1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African-American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position. Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 August 1952
CityAkron, OH
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
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.
What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?
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.
Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.
Poetry connects you to yourself, to the self that doesn't know how to talk or negotiate.
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
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.
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 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 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.
When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.
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.
The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.