Quotes from Rita Dove

Flirtation – After all, there's no need to say anything at first. An orange, peeled and quartered, flares like a tulip on a wedgwood plate. Anything can happen. Outside the sun has rolled up her rugs and night strewn salt across the sky. My heart is humming a tune I haven't heard in years! Quiet's cool flesh– let's sniff and eat it. There are ways to make of the moment a topiary so the pleasure's in walking through.

Reading brings the world into your heart

The sun crouched behind leaves, but the trees had long since walked away. The meaning that surfaces comes to me aslant and I go to meet it, stepping out of my body word for word, until I am everything at once: the perfume of the world in which I go under, a skindiver remembering air

I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh. As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open and above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they've intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven

BELINDA'S PETITION (Boston, February 1782) To the honorable Senate and House of Representatives of this Country, new born: I am Belinda, an African, since the age of twelve a Slave. I will not take too much of your Time, but to plead and place my pitiable Life unto the Fathers of this Nation. Lately your Countrymen have severed the Binds of Tyranny. I would hope you would consider the Same for me, pure Air being the sole Advantage of which I can boast in my present Condition.

THE HOUSE SLAVE Those days I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat, and as the fields unfold to whiteness, and they spill like bees among the fat flowers, I weep. It is not yet daylight.

If, at the end of the Atlantic, Columbus had found only an absence of water, this English tourist would have been there to capture that void with a wide-angle lens. Here, the wind blows from nowhere to nowhere across a plain transformed by salt into a vision of light. Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation. You start out with one thing, end up with another, and nothing's like it used to be, not even the future.

THE HILL HAS SOMETHING TO SAY but isn't talking. Instead the valley groans as the wind, amphoric, hoots its one bad note. Halfway up, we stop to peek through smudged pine: this is Europe and its green terraces. What's left to climb's inside us, : it's not all in the books (but maps don't lie). (For all we know the wind's inside us, pacing our lungs.)

That's success: being happy with your life.

EXEUNT THE VIOLS Listen: even the ocean mourns the passage of voices so pure and penetrant, that insect hum. Who discovered usefulness? Who forgot how to sing, simply? (Magnificence spoke up briefly, followed by the race boat's break-neck dazzle.)…their last chord a breath drawn deep in a garden maze, there near the statue smiling under the stars.

THE BREATHING, THE ENDLESS NEWS each god is empty without us, penitent, raking our yards into windblown piles. . . . Children know this: they are the trailings of gods.

Hush, now. Assay the terrain: all around us dark and the perimeter in flames, but the stars— tiny, missionary stars— on high, serene, studding the inky brow of heaven.

LOOKING UP FROM THE PAGE, I AM REMINDED OF THIS MORTAL COIL Mercurial ribbon licking the cut lip of the Blue Ridge— daybreak or end, I can't tell as long as I ignore the body's marching orders, as long as I am alive in air . . . What good is the brain without traveling shoes?

We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.

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.

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.

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.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

Every day a wilderness—noshade in sight. Beulahpatient among knickknacks,the solarium a rageof light, a grainstormas her gray cloth bringsdark wood to life.

You start out with one thing, endup with another, and nothing'slike it used to be, not even the future.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.