Rita Dove

“From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the...”

“Nexus I wrote stubbornly into the evening. At the window, a giant praying mantis rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass, begging vacantly with pale eyes; and the commas leapt at me...”

“When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.”

“I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instru...”

“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 word...”

“I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.”

“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!”

“I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.”

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

“Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.”

“Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”

“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.”

“I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.”

“The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.”