Rita Dove's poems Contents Introduction

I’m thinking of “Ö” and the way that poem calls attention to the body moving in language. What influence has dance had on your writing?
Oh, wow! Well, another way poetry persuades us is by making the body participate in the work subconsciously. As we read, somewhere inside we are breathing along. We hit the end of a line, and the body thinks, take a little breath; if the sentence spills over into the next line, then it’s a very little breath. So, a syncopation builds up against the normal in-out iambic pentameter. Langston Hughes does this better than anyone. Even if the reader is not reading the poem aloud, the tongue and the palette are subconsciously engaged in pronouncing the words. You come to the word “ugly” in a poem, and it is ugly in your mouth. It stops you. It feels ugly. Just like “twitching stars” feel jittery. I’ve always been very aware of enjambment, alert to working sound against sense.
Then I took up ballroom dancing, and in a certain way, the process was reversed: How do I get the movement of the entire body—through space, against music—into a poem? While writing, I found myself telling my reader, Dance with me. Let’s go—not only with your mind. Not with just your face, your lips, and tongue. Not only with just your lungs, as you breathe in and out. I want your whole body to move.
And that was the fun of my poetry collection American Smooth. I was trying to engage the entire body—not only in the dance poems, but in the other poems as well. For instance, in “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove,” several of the sentences are so long—thanks, German!—that you don’t know where to take a breath; when you finally reach the period, you’re practically gasping. There’s the passage where Hattie McDaniel is remembering being six years old, walking hand in hand with a white girl. They’d been friends before … life intervened. But to get to that surprising moment, I had to tumble the reader back so quickly, they can’t take that breath. First, I woo them with a litany of her stage names: “High-Hat Hattie, Mama Mac, blah, blah, blah.” Now we’re dancing; it gets faster and faster, leaping into the next stanza—and then I stop the sentence. The scrolling back of memory until we land, six years old—but at the same time, Hattie’s still walking toward the Coconut Grove. So, the brain is racing at the same time as, inexorably, she’s approaching that restaurant. 
Edward Hirsch talks about the line that exceeds the breath as entering a space of prophecy, taking us out of the common sense of the body and into a different space. You have poems that call us out of that space, but others seem to work inside of it. I’m thinking of “Geometry” in particular. Both the iambic pentameter and the content seem to be setting us somewhere we already know, or think we do.