Rita Dove
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Doveis an American poet and author. From 1993 to 1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African-American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position. Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 August 1952
CityAkron, OH
In working on a poem,I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things
It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
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!
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
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.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Here's a riddle for Our Age: when the sky's the limit, how can you tell you've gone too far?
For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
She took a group of us to see a living author, just a book signing. But that's really all it took to get me started on realizing my dream.
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.
I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.
My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it's going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down.
Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.