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!
— Rita Dove
It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.
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.
It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.
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 try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.
I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.
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.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
