It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
More Quotes from Rita Dove:
What writing does is to reveal.Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
We tend to be so bombarded with information. . . 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.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!
Rita Dove
There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
Rita Dove
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Based on Keywords: laureateI believe that a long step toward public morality will have been taken when sins are called by their right names.
Billy Sunday
And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.
Chauncey Wright
If there was a distraction I'd get up and jump out the window. I was quite out of hand. In schools like that I don't think they expect that girls are going to behave in such an outrageous fashion.
Diane Cilento