Rita Dove Interview (page: 2 / 4) Former Poet Laureate of the United States	Print Interview

How would you explain to someone who has never read poetry, what it is that so enthralls you?

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

Very often, people who are not familiar with poetry, or don't know much about it, are operating out of fear. At some point in their life, they've been given a poem to interpret and told, "That was the wrong answer." You know. I think we've all gone through that. I went through that. And it's unfortunate that sometimes in schools -- this need to have things quantified and graded -- we end up doing this kind of multiple choice approach to something that should be as ambiguous and ever-changing as life itself. So I try to ask them, "Have you ever heard a good joke?" If you've ever heard someone tell a joke just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to the poetry. Because it's really about using words in very precise ways and also using gesture as it goes through language, not the gesture of your hands, but how language creates a mood. And you know, who can resist a good joke? When they get that far, then they can realize that poetry can also be fun.
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Was there a teacher who particularly inspired you?

Rita Dove: Well I had a couple.

I had a couple teachers who did inspire me. One was this eleventh grade English teacher -- eleventh and twelfth grade. She and I, we still have tea together sometimes today. I was frightened before I went into her class. I heard she was a battle axe. I heard that she would flunk you if you split an infinitive. And it's true. She would, but she also would tell you what a split infinitive was, and then once you knew, you never did it again. She just opened up to me, how language -- how the written word -- can also sing. And she spent, I remember once, 45 minutes on one page: the first page of a novel. By the end of the class, no one had taken down a single note, because we were absolutely enthralled. It was incredible.
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What was the name of this teacher?

Rita Dove: Her name was Miss Oechsner. Margaret Oechsner. And, as I said, every time I go back home to Akron, Ohio, we get together and have lunch or tea or something like that. And there were others.

I had a ninth grade English teacher, Mr. Hicks, who put us in groups and gave us impossible poems to interpret. When I say "impossible," I mean poems which had Greek in them -- a little bit of Greek and -- languages we couldn't even -- we couldn't even read the alphabet. "Just tell me what it means. Tell me what you think it means." And after a couple of class periods when we decided this is so impossible we might as well just make a wild guess, it turned out our guesses weren't so wild after all. So he taught us to trust what your gut reaction was to something. Even if you didn't understand every word, to work out the context.
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And in college, I had a couple of fantastic teachers. I had a teacher who taught fiction, who strolled into class the first day and said, "We're going to tell stories. Who's gonna start?" And we're all gasping. We thought we were going to have a chance to write it down on paper. No, he made us talk. He made us begin a story. We didn't have to end it, but just how are you going to catch someone's attention? What are you going to say right away? It was a phenomenal lesson.

But I think the most important influences were really my parents. My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. The one thing that was important was the fact that you never said, "I don't get it, I'm going to give up." You start small and you work at it a little bit at a time. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends, and isn't that great.

Were there many kids in the family?

Rita Dove: I have two younger sisters and an older brother. They're all chemists or mathematicians. All of us love to read. The whole family is full of scientists.

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