Saturday Poetry – ‘Heart to Heart’ by Rita Dove
Saturday Poetry – ‘Heart to Heart’ by Rita Dove
This week’s Saturday Poetry brings you the soul-stirring poem titled ‘Heart to Heart’ by Rita Dove. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, Rita Dove served as the US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005 to 2011. She explains her thoughts behind this poem, ‘how to find words for the human heart and all the emotions we ascribe to it? The path is a veritable minefield of clichés—those well-intentioned, once-fresh expressions whose very popularity has rendered them useless, even laughable. I decided to take these tired metaphors and deconstruct their camouflage, until all that remains is the true ‘heart’ of the matter: one human being, stripped of blather and artifice, speaking to the beloved.’
For this edition of Saturday Poetry, we have paired Rita Dove’s emotive words with mobile art by the talented @catchthemoment_nl with the captivating artwork entitled ‘Lusciousness’ complementing the poem’s essence beautifully, creating a symphony of emotions.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
via Poets.org
Saturday Poetry – ‘Heart to Heart’ by Rita Dove
It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.
It doesn’t have
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—
but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.
Please support us
TheAppWhisperer has always had a dual mission: to promote the most talented mobile artists of the day and to support ambitious, inquisitive viewers the world over. As the years pass TheAppWhisperer has gained readers and viewers and found new venues for that exchange.
All this work thrives with the support of our community.
Please consider donating to TheAppWhisperer as this New Year commences because your support helps protect our independence and we can keep delivering the promotion of mobile artists that’s open for everyone around the world. Every contribution, however big or small, is so valuable for our future.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter BA (Hons), ARPS is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator, and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.She holds a First Class Honours degree in Photography and is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS).Her journalism, criticism and editorial work have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography and NikonPro, among other international publications.Through TheAppWhisperer, she brings together academic knowledge, professional photographic expertise and more than 17 years of specialist editorial experience to examine contemporary photography, mobile imaging, computational photography, photographic applications and emerging imaging technologies.
