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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.

Rita Dove

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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Come
Teachers
Need
Early
Children
Poetry
Needs
Instead
Trying
Teacher
Make
Literature
Sure
Pontificate
Talk
Curriculum

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Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.
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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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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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A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.
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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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By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.
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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 believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.
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I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.
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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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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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At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.
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I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn't know their names?
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When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.
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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.
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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
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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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For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
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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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Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
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