The American Dream is a phrase we’ll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we’re redefining it now. – Rita Dove
I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels. – Rita Dove
You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can’t imagine something that has never existed before, it’s impossible. – Rita Dove
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. – Rita Dove
There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry. – Rita Dove
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. – Rita Dove
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. – Rita Dove
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early. – Rita Dove
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age. – Rita Dove
Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature. – Rita Dove
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something. – Rita Dove
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding. – 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
I’ve always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned. – Rita Dove
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. – Rita Dove
All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself. – Rita Dove
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. – Rita Dove