Rita Dove

Billie Holiday’s burned voice

Poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America. . . . We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry is the purest of the language arts. It’s the tightest cage, and if you can get to sing in that cage it’s really really wonderful.