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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
Heard
Thought
Many
Years
Overheard
Aria
Whisper
Poem

More quotes by Rita Dove

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Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
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I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.
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Libraries are where it all begins.
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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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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.
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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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I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.
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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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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.
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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.
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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!
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Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more.
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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.
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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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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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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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We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.
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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
Rita Dove
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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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The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.
Rita Dove