Rita Dove Quotes

If you can't be free, be a mystery.

I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn't know their names?

If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

When I was young, I was older than I am today.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

If fucking were graceful,desire an alibi.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

If you cannot be free, be a mystery.

I tell you, if you feel strange, strange things will happen to you: Fallen peacocks on library shelves

The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world -- just the world as you think you know it.

don't think you can ever forget her don't even try she's not going to budge no choice but to grant her space crown her with sky for she is one of the many and she is each of us

Since she's discovered men would rather drown than nibble, she does just fine.

Women invented misery, but we don't understand it.

Against Self-Pity It gets you nowhere but deeper into your own shit--pure misery a luxury one never learns to enjoy.

Our situation is intolerable, but what's worse is to sit here and do nothing.

When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.

Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.

There is not going to be any change unless we can begin to talk about any little fear, any little hatred, any little bias that we might have and to admit that all human beings have them.

I've never stopped wanting to cross the equator, or touch an elk's horns, or sing Tosca or screw James Dean in a field of wheat. To hell with wisdom. They're all wrong: I'll never be through with my life.

Nexus I wrote stubbornly into the evening. At the window, a giant praying mantis rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass, begging vacantly with pale eyes; and the commas leapt at me like worms or miniature scythes blackened with age. the praying mantis screeched louder, his ragged jaws opening into formlessness. I walked outside; the grass hissed at my heels. Up ahead in the lapping darkness he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green, a brontosaurus, a poet.

To those inclined toward kindness, I say Come out of your houses drumming. All others, beware: I have discarded my smile but not my teeth.

The house, shut up like a pocket watch, those tight hearts breathing inside— she could never invent them.

PITHOS Climb into a jar and live for a while. Chill earth. No stars in this stone sky. You have ceased to ache. Your spine is a flower.

The First Book Open it. Go ahead, it won't bite. Well. . . maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world-- just the world as you think you know it.

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled, stooped to pull harder- when, sprung out of the earth on his glittering terrible carriage, he claimed his due. It is finished. No one had heard her. No one! She had strayed from the herd. (Remember: go straight to school. This is important, stop fooling around! Don't answer to strangers. Stick with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.) This is how easily the pit opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

Iedereen wil dat wonderkinderen mislukken. Dat maakt onze eigen middelmatigheid beter te verdragen.

We wire the sky for comfort; we thread it through our lungs for a perfect fit. We’ve arranged this calm, though it is constantly unraveling. Where does it go then, atmosphere suckered up an invisible flue? How can we know where it goes?

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled, stooped to pull harder- when, sprung out of the earth on his glittering terrible carriage, he claimed his due. It is finished. No one had heard her. No one! She had strayed from the herd. (Remember: go straight to school. This is important, stop fooling around! Don't answer to strangers. Stick with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.) This is how easily the pit opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

LA CHAPELLE. 92ND DIVISION. TED. (September, 1918) This lonely beautiful word means church and it is quiet here; the stone walls curve like slow water. It’s Sunday and I’m standing on the bitter ridge of France, overlooking the war. La Guerre is asleep. This morning early on patrol we slipped down through the mist and scent of burning woodchips (somewhere someone was warm) into Moyenmoutier… a cloister of flushed brick and a little river braiding its dark hair. Back home in Louisiana the earth is red, but it suckles you until you can sing yourself grown. Here, even the wind has edges. Drizzle splintered around us; we stood on the arched bridge and thought for a moment of the dead we had left behind in the valley, in the terrible noise.

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.

Three miles from my adopted city lies a village where I came to peace. The world there was a calm place, even the great Danube no more than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape by a girl’s careless hand. Into this stillness I had been ordered to recover. The hills were gold with late summer; my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen, situated upstairs in the back of a cottage at the end of the Herrengasse. From my window I could see onto the courtyard where a linden tree twined skyward — leafy umbilicus canted toward light, warped in the very act of yearning — and I would feed on the sun as if that alone would dismantle the silence around me. At first I raged. Then music raged in me, rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough to ease the roiling. I would stop to light a lamp, and whatever I’d missed — larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd’s home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I would rage again. I am by nature a conflagration; I would rather leap than sit and be looked at. So when my proud city spread her gypsy skirts, I reentered, burning towards her greater, constant light. Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you, every tenderness I have ever known has been nothing but thwarted violence, an ache so permanent and deep, the lightest touch awakens it. . . . It is impossible to care enough. I have returned with a second Symphony and 15 Piano Variations which I’ve named Prometheus, after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god who knew the worst sin is to take what cannot be given back. I smile and bow, and the world is loud. And though I dare not lean in to shout Can’t you see that I’m deaf? — I also cannot stop listening.

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.

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.

TESTIMONIAL Back when the earth was new and heaven just a whisper, back when the names of things hadn’t had time to stick; back when the smallest breezes melted summer into autumn, when all the poplars quivered sweetly in rank and file . . . the world called, and I answered. Each glance ignited to a gaze. I caught my breath and called that life, swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet. I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn’t know their names?

FOR SOPHIE, WHO’LL BE IN FIRST GRADE IN THE YEAR 2000 No bright toy this world we’ve left you. Even the wrapping is torn, the ribbons grease-flecked and askew. Still, it’s all we have. Wait a moment before you pick it up. Study its scratches, how it shines in places. Now love what you touch, and you will touch wisely. May the world, in your hands, brighten with use. May you sleep in sweet breath and rise always in wonder to mountain and forest, green gaze and silk cheek—

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?

Seas was the one who'd urged her to tattoo the scars she'd cut with the razor blade. the serpent- sign of transformation and healing. The quote, from Rita Dove's poem "Dawn Revisited." About second chances. The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open

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.)

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.

That's success: being happy with your life.

Reading brings the world into your heart

I can’t wear it on my sleeve, or tell you from the bottom of it how I feel. Here, it’s all yours, now— but you’ll have to take me, too.

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.

You were young,” Rainey said. “Of course you expected to escape. That kind of luck can convince you you’re immortal.” Caitlin touched her right arm, where the tattoo read, the whole sky. Rainey didn’t know about its meaning to her. It was a line from Rita Dove’s poem “Dawn Revisited.” The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open

Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby. No bleeped sheep or rosebuds or twitching stars will diminish the fear or save you from waking into the same day you dreamed of leaving—

She wanted a little room for thinking… —Rita Dove, “Daystar” Every person who lives outside his context is always a bit of a ghost, because I am here, but at the same time I remember a person who walked those streets, who is there, and that same person is me. So sometimes I really don’t know if I am here or there. —Reinaldo Arenas, 1983 (as published in Ann Tashi Slater, “Fata Morgana: Reinaldo Arenas, Writers in Exile, and a Visit to the Havana of 1987,” Paris Review, March 4, 2014)

For Bly is certainly not alone in this trait of withering away his talent with the years. Most poets have a prime of 35-50 years old. It takes a couple decades or so to ramp up your talent, shed your imitations, & gain the maturity to formulate a POV that is unique & not generic. After 50 youthful desire wanes, success weakens what age does not, & the mind loses its elasticity a bit, in most. Rare is the poet that improves with age (usually it’s stagnation, then regression)- among big-name English language poets only Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, & Robert Hayden stand in contrast. Bly’s company includes Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Quincey Troupe, Carolyn Forche, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Gary Snyder, & dozens of recognizable names (at least among those who had some talent to begin with). Yet, that still does not absolve the individual, nor his/her work. For this Bly stands accused, tried, convicted, & sentenced to a slow fade away from any lasting import in American poetry. (...) But it highlights the frequency with which Bly falls into didacticism- a trait he always displays with audiences- reading & rereading the most inconsequential images, lines, stanzas, & poems as if of cosmic import. It’s also the dead giveaway of a man unsure of himself, his talent, & in need of constant reinforcement. But then he’s always played the “insecure liberal”, wasting time & energy in politics that should go to art, who needs to show his/her innate goodness, go to a [3rd World country/rehab center/orphanage/social activist group] to see how the other ½ lives, translate 5th rate poetasters into English, & leach bad poems from the transformative period so crucial to their growth as a poet/person.