Rita Dove

Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and author. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States (1993–1995), and is the only poet awarded both the National Humanities Medal (1996) and the National Medal of Arts (2011).

Rita Dove

Quotes

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

• I am Rita Dove,
  the beautiful dove.
  See my black neck,
  see my speck.
  
  My ass is not so much cracked
  but i want to get out now.
  
  The poet, am I.
  Am me.
  • America, 1988^{[specific citation needed]}

• The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.
  • Rita Dove's definition of the world "library", as displayed on a sign at the entrance of the Maine State Library in Augusta, Maine.

from interviews and conversations

• I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin.
  • 1992 interview included in Conversations with Rita Dove Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll (2003)

• There are poets I return to again and again for sustenance: I read them, shake my head and wonder, How did they do that? I go back to figures like Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy, for example, and Langston Hughes and Shakespeare, and some prose writers as well - James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
  • 1993 interview included in Conversations with Rita Dove

• I discovered that poetry and drama have more in common than Aristotle, with his "classic dramatic unities," may have cared to admit. Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama was "life the with the dull bits cut out," and Gwendolyn Brooks defines poetry as "life distilled"-where's the big difference? For if a poet planes away unnecessary matter so that we can see clearly to the very core of the soul, a playwright commits the same sacred enterprise by training her spotlight on some select souls and then summoning the audience to listen, to bear witness in the dark.
  • 2000 interview included in Conversations with Rita Dove

• I believe my poetry reflects an intense relationship to the music of the spoken word. Writing plays involves not only language, but the interplay of various languages-different characters' varying speech patterns and inflections, personalities-as well as the visible rhythms of bodies relating to each other. A domestic scene in a play is like a string quartet.
  • 2000 interview included in Conversations with Rita Dove

External links

• Rita Dove Homepage at University of Virginia with links to numerous resources