Rita Dove's poems Contents Introduction

2.2. Image analysis in Rita Dove’s poems
Well, first of all, that’s an early poem; I needed to step outside of the cage of common perception. The world of “Geometry” is a very regulated world. There’s a house. There are walls. Things fit together. It’s all neat. “I prove a theorem and the house expands.” What I’m saying is, “Even though that cage of the normal world is still there, the mind can soar.” You needn’t fear that you’re going to tumble off into space and never come back again; simply by proving these absolute facts of math, you can enter a realm where there are no walls. I never really thought about it that intellectually, but it did feel very important for it to be in tercets—the kind of numbers we associate with stability, the threes and the fours. These three-line stanzas: This is the world in which we exist. Curiously enough, it’s also the world in which most music exists. Four-four and three-four, the basic time signatures, ballads and waltzes. But within that world of rules, there’s a whole outer space full of possibilities and variations.
How do you navigate the dual identities as a public advocate of poetry and as a poet, someone deeply invested in interior life, the private act of the encounter with the page? After winning the National Book Award, Terrance Hayes talked about “losing the critical reader.” Is that something you’ve contended with?
He’s absolutely right. You do lose the critical reader, and it’s the most grievous loss caused by this kind of fame. It seems disingenuous to say, “I wish I were just out there sending out my poems anonymously.” But there is a sense that anything I write will be published just because of my name. Negotiating that has been difficult. I tend to send out less and less and less. For instance, I didn’t send a single poem out from Sonata Mulattica until the entire book was finished. Because I did not want someone to say, “Oh, this is so wonderful.” I needed time to decide myself if it was holding together, if it was good enough. And then, only after the whole book was done, I did this crazy blitz of submissions, sending all the poems out in a single weekend. I also didn’t show my editor the book until it was already done. Bless Carol Smith! She was very patient. She just waited. If I cannot have a critical reader, then I have to rely on time. If I look back over a draft a year later, or six months, does it still hold up? It is not an easy thing to do. I long for a critical reader. 
Any writer, any artist will tell you that whatever they’re working on next is the most querulous, frightening new space that you can move in. Even if a book has just come out, with any luck you’re knee-deep already in something else, which is very different and scary and you’re insecure about it. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I want to feel insecure. I want to feel like I’m opening up something completely new, not just banking on my old collateral. That sounds like a very boring way to live.