"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"
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Comedy is Rita Dove's sly gateway drug to lyric attention. By starting with the low-stakes intimacy of "a good joke", she sidesteps the museum-glass aura that can cling to poetry and goes straight to the body: timing, breath, the moment a room tips into laughter. "Just right" is doing a lot of work here. It implies craft rather than inspiration, an earned exactness that sounds effortless only when someone has practiced it into muscle memory.
The subtext is a quiet democratization. If you've laughed at a well-told story, Dove suggests, you already possess the sensory training poetry demands. Poetry isn't an elite code; it's a heightened version of skills we recognize in everyday performance. That matters coming from a poet who has consistently pushed against narrow definitions of what counts as "literary" voice, folding song, speech, and cultural memory into formal precision.
Her emphasis on "pacing" and "gesture" is also a rebuke to page-bound thinking. The line breaks and meter are not just visual; they're choreography. Gesture widens "words" into the full apparatus of communication: silence, emphasis, posture, the half-second delay before the punchline lands. In an era where people consume language through clips, readings, and memes, Dove is asserting something both old and newly relevant: poetry lives where attention meets timing. The joke is the proof-of-concept. The poem is the sustained version of that exacting, communal magic.
The subtext is a quiet democratization. If you've laughed at a well-told story, Dove suggests, you already possess the sensory training poetry demands. Poetry isn't an elite code; it's a heightened version of skills we recognize in everyday performance. That matters coming from a poet who has consistently pushed against narrow definitions of what counts as "literary" voice, folding song, speech, and cultural memory into formal precision.
Her emphasis on "pacing" and "gesture" is also a rebuke to page-bound thinking. The line breaks and meter are not just visual; they're choreography. Gesture widens "words" into the full apparatus of communication: silence, emphasis, posture, the half-second delay before the punchline lands. In an era where people consume language through clips, readings, and memes, Dove is asserting something both old and newly relevant: poetry lives where attention meets timing. The joke is the proof-of-concept. The poem is the sustained version of that exacting, communal magic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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