MUSIC always has been at the center of Rita Dove’s poetry and her life. And not just because poetry, as the French philosopher Voltaire wrote, is “the music of the soul.” She played cello as a child, was in the orchestra and served as a drum majorette in school.

   More recently, the former U.S. poet laureate, who will read Oct. 17 at the 12th annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival in Stockton, has become a ballroom dancer, a passion that found its way into her 2004 book, American Smooth.

   Writing in The New York Times, Emily Nussbaum said that the poet “pulls the ultimate dance trick: she makes it look easy” and that American Smooth casts dance as “an implicit parallel to poetry.”

   ”Each is an expression of grace performed within limits; each an art weighted by history but malleable enough to form something utterly new,” she writes.

   American Smooth, then, is pure Rita Dove.

   Ms. Dove’s latest, Sonata Mulattica, is a poem cycle that tells the story of the violin prodigy George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the grandson of an African prince and a former pupil of Haydn, who was first a friend of Beethoven and then a rival. Music, as can be expected from its subject, is at the book’s center.

   ”Music always has been a part of my life and if it is part of your life then hopefully it will leak into your art as well,” she says.

   Ms. Dove took up ballroom dancing a few years ago after her house in Virginia was struck by lightning and badly damaged in the subsequent fire. Ms. Dove’s neighbors took her and her husband, Fred Viebahn, to a dinner dance. It was such an enjoyable experience, she says, that “we thought we’d like to do that.”

   ”The entire neighborhood signed up for ballroom dances at a local studio, but my husband and I were the only ones who stuck with it,” she continues. “I love the fact that you can move your entire body to music.”

   That love of music’s physical embodiment is evident in her poetry.

   ”It bleeds into the poetry and not only in the subject matter,” she says. “Music always has been around in the poems. I like to think that the poems themselves are musical. If poetry doesn’t sing in some way, what distinguishes it from prose? The language is there to be made to sing.”

   There are a number of ways that poetry achieves this, she says, including the choice of vibrant language and its visual presence on the page, which can be like sheet music for the reader.

   ”When you’re reading the poem, say a long skinny poem, you get a certain feeling about it,” she says. “If its lines are long you get a different feeling. There are certain sensations as you’re entering the poem.”

   Sonata Mullatica, like many of her books, is organized around a central theme — in this case, the life of a now- forgotten musician. Their organic unity, however, only shows itself in the final product.

   ”When I sit down to write, I have no idea what I have in mind,” she says. “It is mostly fragmented, either a yearning or an intense curiosity. Sometimes, I start with a word or a phrase — two or three lines. I have lots of scraps that begin to build, to accrue. The goal is when I release it to the world, it has a sense of its own trajectory.”

   She begins the process without preconceived notions.

   ”In the making of it, of the poem, I try to keep my mind open and my options open, my receptors open without closing...” she says. “Sometimes I may think I’m writing about one particular thing and perhaps I am really writing about another uncomfortable truth.”

   Ms. Dove currently is on tour promoting the book, doing readings up and down the East Coast. She says she was a shy child who loved books and who never dreamed of standing in front of the larger crowds that sometimes attend her readings.

   ”I discovered poetry because I’m more comfortable curling up in a corner with a book than being outside in the yard,” she says.

   She got over her shyness, however, after reading at a scholarship presentation at the Breadloaf Writers Conference after college. She had given a very small reading before that, of which she remembers very little, except for “being in a blind panic.”

   She had a friend who “did this wonderful thing” — she made her practice reading her poetry with a pencil in her mouth, which softened her terror and made her “realize that I could never be as ridiculous as I was with the pencils in my mouth,” she says.

   And while she still gets stage fright, she now “enjoy(s) engaging with the audience and hearing them listen and talking to people afterwards. Getting that immediate feedback is immensely gratifying,” she says. Public readings are important, she says, because it elevates the poem from the page.

   ”To engage the auditory senses is really part of poetry,” she says. “I think poetry is meant to be heard. You either hear it in your head when you’re reading it or, if you’re lucky, you hear someone read it. It is more sensual and engages the senses more.”

   Readings also allow her to bring poetry to the people, which she viewed as her mission when she was poet laureate in the early 1990s.

   ”I wanted to bring poems into the home and the places where people live and show them that poetry is about life and not about an ivory tower,” she says.

   She is pleased that later laureates like Robert Pinsky continued her efforts to make poetry a part of the average person’s life. Ms. Dove was not as systematic in her approach as Mr. Pinsky, who created the “Favorite Poem Project.” But she used her position to talk about poetry every chance she had — and still does.

   ”I’d just talk about poetry because I love it,” she says.

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  Pulitzer Prize-winner Rita Dove will read at the 12th annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival, Prallsville Mills, Route 29, Stockton, Oct. 17, 8 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are accepted. Limited seating is first-come, first-served. 908-996-3685; 908-500-4000; www.riverunionstage.org; www.nicholasdigiovanni.com