Word: dove
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...reader feels a deep intimacy with these people and their history. A similar sense of connection is what Dove hopes to bring to her new post. She believes she can make poetry seem less airy and irrelevant. "I think one of the things you have to do is show that poets are real people who write about real things," she says. "I'm hoping that by the end of my term people will think of a poet laureate as someone who's out there with her sleeves rolled up and working, not sitting in an ivory tower looking...
...Dove wants to re-create for the young her own awestruck discovery of poetry's power, which began when she took down an anthology of American verse from the bookshelf in her family's home in Akron. After that, her otherwise strict parents made no attempt to censor what she read, and she read everything from Gone With the Wind to Sylvia Plath. "I remember reading ((Plath's)) poem Daddy, which ends, 'Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through,' " says Dove. "I realized that you don't have to be polite in poetry, and I couldn't get enough...
...first Dove's love affair with poems unfolded with little encouragement -- or interference -- from her teachers. That convinced her that poetry should be experienced, not talked -- or taught -- to death. "One of the major reasons why poetry has gotten a bad rap is that at school we had to read a poem and then answer questions about it," says Dove. "But I think that when a poem moves you, it moves you in a way that leaves you speechless. Poems, if they're really wonderful poems, have used the best possible words and in the best possible order, and anything...
...Dove hopes to restore that sense of personal discovery through high tech. She wants to use closed-circuit TV to broadcast readings into elementary and junior high schools, then answer questions from the students. "I think we can get these kids when they're young," she says. "I think they would be sufficiently intrigued by the closed-circuit aspect of it. It also gets them out of regular classes. I'll take it from there...
...that Dove is aiming for the lowest common denominator. She believes poems can be too easy, too accessible to have lasting value. "There should be something to intrigue you, to hold you enough so that you're willing to live with it and work it out on your own," she says. "A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it." With Dove as poet laureate, Americans will get plenty of poetic sustenance...