Rita Dove Quotes
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If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
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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.
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I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
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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.
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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.
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It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
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Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.
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To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.
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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.
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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
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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.
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I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.
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What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?
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Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.
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There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
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I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.
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My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom.
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I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.
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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.
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Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.
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The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.
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Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.
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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.
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If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.
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What writing does is to reveal.
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