Latest Rita Dove Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• If the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920's Harlem let's say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it's really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems.

  Rita Dove

  Moving, Mean, Humanity

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.

  Rita Dove

  Moving, Thinking, Race

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• 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.

  Rita Dove

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.

  Rita Dove

  Moving, Thinking, Wish

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• My first advice would be to read, read, read, which sounds interesting coming in a digital age, but it's so much easier to listen to a poem than it is to sit down and actually read it and to hear it in your head and that is something that every poet or aspiring poet needs to be able to do, I think to hear it in their head.

  Rita Dove

  Thinking, Interesting, Advice

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.

  Rita Dove

  Thinking, Age, Attention

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• 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.

  Rita Dove

  Mother, Children, Book

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

  Rita Dove

  Writing, Hopefully Not, Historical

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• 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.

  Rita Dove

  School, Thinking, White

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.

  Rita Dove

  Writing, Quality, Needs

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

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

  Rita Dove

  Writing, Thinking, World

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• 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.

  Rita Dove

  War, Moving, Thinking

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.

  Rita Dove

  Notebook, Eye, Writing

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• 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.

  Rita Dove

  Notebook, Inspiration, Writing

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• 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.

  Rita Dove

  Writing, Discovery, Never Quit

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.

• 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.

  Rita Dove

  Writing, Mean, Trying

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. November 19, 2009.