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

Rita Dove

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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Many
Years
Overheard
Aria
Whisper
Poem
Heard
Thought

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The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.
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There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
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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
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We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.
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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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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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I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.
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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.
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I write short stories, and I wrote a play.
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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.
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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
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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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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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Libraries are where it all begins.
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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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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.
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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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Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?
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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.
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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.
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