Poet's Corner

Rita Dove

Read the poem "Geometry"
Also known as: Rita (Frances) Dove, Rita Frances Dove
Born: August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: Writer

Biographical Essay

In The Poet's World (1995), a collection of essays written during her l993-95 term as the United States' seventh Poet Laureate, Rita Dove makes a surprising declaration, "My pleasures are taken in the intimate details of life, the miracles of the ordinary." Dove's artistic range seems boundless, fed by her knowledge of world history and literature. But a generous spirit guides her intellectual curiosity: she does not want to learn facts or to observe art and artifacts; she wants to engage with the world and its people.

Whether writing about herself, her grandparents, an ancient Chinese princess, a German woman widowed during World War II, mythological characters, the blues singer Bessie Smith, or even a fossilized fish, Dove brings readers closer to ourselves, our world, and each other. She has read widely and travelled extensively, but she also grounds her work in her own intimate, ordinary experiences as a daughter, granddaughter, wife, mother, African American, woman and teacher. As she observed in a l991 interview published in Callaloo, "significant events in the private sphere are rarely written up in history books, although they make up the life-sustaining fabric of humanity." This same fabric gives life, warmth, texture, and color to Dove's poetry, fiction, essays, and drama.

Born in Akron, Ohio in l952, Dove only recently became a "Southerner": In l993 she took the position of Commonwealth Profesor of English at the University of Virginia and now lives near Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn, and their daughter, Aviva. Although a Midwesterner by birth, Dove can trace some of her personal as well as her artistic heritage back to the South.

Like many contemporary Southern writers, her works often convey the importance of recognizing one's connection to a particular place and the need to remember the past, even--or especially--when that past evokes painful memories. Her grandparents, on whose lives she loosely based the sequence of poems Thomas and Beulah, were among the many African Americans who left the south for the north during the Great Migration that occurred during the early twentieth century. According to Ekaterini Georgoudaki, Thomas's mandolin playing "preserves and conveys to the next generation of blacks their rich cultural heritage and the communal values which many of them lost when they migrated from the rural south to the industrial north. The poet inherits both her grandmother's transforming imagination and her grandfather's storytelling ability." Dove earned the l987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah, a tribute to her, her grandparents, and to the vitality of the southern African American folk tradition.

As a poet, Dove is an iconoclast and a traditionalist, both in terms of subject and technique. She admires the Western tradition's heroes and heroines, its saints and its artists, but when speculating on the private moments of these individuals, she focuses on their quirks as well as their accomplishments, their sexuality as well as their spirituality.

In the poem "Robert Schumann, Or: Musical Genius Begins with Afflictions," she imagines the composer driven by lust and music while engaged in an encounter with a prostitute; in "Catherine of Alexandria" she explores the sexual connection that may have existed between this saint and her God:

Deprived of learning and

the chance to travel,

no wonder Sainthood

came as a voice in your bed--

and what went on

each night was fit for nobody's ears.

On occasion, Dove also writes against the grain of the African American literary tradition. "Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, In a Dream" offers an irreverent, even caustic look at one of the most significant writers of the Black Arts Movement of the l960s. The speaker, presumably Dove, sees "caviar / Imbedded like buckshot between his teeth. / His hair falls out in clumps of burned-out wire." But while this dream version of Lee disintegrates, "The music grows like branches in the wind" and the the speaker lie down, "chuckling as the grass curls around me."

Well-versed in the craft of poetry, sensitive to the nuances of language, rhythm and meter, Dove often revises traditional poetic forms. For example, her experiments with the villanelle and the sestina allowed her to write "Parsley." This poem explores the mind and motives of the genocidal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo who, on October 2, l957, had 20,000 Black Haitians executed, allegedly because they could not pronounce the letter "r."

In her most recent collection of poems, Mother Love (l995), she uses a series of sonnets based on the myth of Demeter and Persephone to grapple with mother-daughter relationships. Aware that she does not always strictly adhere to the conventions of the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet, Dove contends: "Much has been said about the many ways to `violate' the sonnet in the service of American speech or modern love or whatever; I will simply say that I like how the sonnet comforts even while its prim borders (but what a pretty fence!) are stultifying; one is constantly bumping against Order" ("An Intact World," preface to Mother Love).

Although in Mother Love Dove does take liberties with the sonnet form, a transgression she stops just short of confessing, she implies that she retains the sonnet's essence: the ability to create order and to exist as a world unto itself.

When addressing the issues of race and gender, Dove also asserts her artistic independence. "In my poems, and in my stories, too, I try very hard to create characters who are seen as individuals--not only as Blacks or as women, or whatever, but as a Black woman with her own particular problems, or one White bum struggling in a specific predicament--as persons who have their very individual lives, and whose histories make them react to the world in different ways," (l991 Callaloo interview). "One could argue that insisting upon that individuality is ultimately a political act, and to my mind, this is one of the fundamental principles a writer has to uphold, along with a warning: don't be swallowed up. Don't be swallowed up."

Dove does not shy away from addressing the effects of race and gender on individual identity. In fact, she often approaches the question of being black and female from an intensely personal perspective. In her autobiographical poems about her daughter, who has the physical characteristics of both her black mother and her white father, Dove reflects on, questions, and celebrates her own experiences as an African American and as a woman. In "Genetic Expedition," Dove observes: "My child has / her father's hips, his hair / like the miller's daughter, combed gold. / Though her lips are mine, housewives / stare when we cross the parking lot because of that ghostly profusion." The poem "After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed" suggests that the mother-daughter bond transcends race: "Every month she wants / to know where it hurts / and what the wrinkled string means / between my legs. This is good blood / I say, but that's wrong, too. / How to tell her that it's what makes us-- / black mother, cream child. / That we're in the pink / and the pink's in us." Given Dove's inclusive vision, readers might also interpret us to mean all people in addition to the poet and her daughter.

There are no easy answers to questions of racial and gender identity, as Dove reveals in numerous works. Based on a little known historical incident, "The Transport of Slaves From Maryland to Mississippi" focuses on an enslaved woman's decision to help a black wagon driver wounded during a violent slave revolt. The speaker helps this individual because "I am no brute. I got feelings. / He might have been a friend of mind." As a result of her assistance, this man rides for help and the slaves are recaptured. Dove relates this woman's story from a detached perspective, leaving questions of morality, betrayal, loyalty, and salvation up to the reader. This poem is one of the many in which Dove gives voice to her interest in "the underside of the story" not in "big historical events." Like many African American writers, Dove treats history with suspicion; she knows that the official records record time, not moments, and only moments provide the real source of truth.

Though she is best known for her poetry, Dove has also written fiction and drama. When asked in an l986 interview if her foray into fiction was a sidestep, she replied: "Just as it's tragic to pigeonhole individuals according to stereotypes, there's no reason to subscribe authors to particular genres, either. I'm a writer, and I write in the form that most suits what I want to say." Her novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), tells the story of a young black woman's coming of age. The protagonist, Virginia Evans, is a musician and an aspiring actress. Dove skillfully blends the story of this young woman's quest for personal knowledge and fulfillment with numerous observations about the magic of art. The advice Virginia receives from one of her college professors, Nathan Mannheim, seems to echo Dove's own ars poetica: "Don't be afraid of the space around you . . . . Take it in your hands. Shape it. Make it come to life."

Fifth Sunday (1985), a collection of eight short stories, also reflects the author's virtuosity, including her use of alternating first-person narrators in one of the stories, "Damon and Vandalia," and recreating her experiences in Germany in "The Spray Paint King."

Her only full-length play, The Darker Face of the Earth, written in l994 and revised for a second edition published in l996, tackles a rarely discussed aspect of slaverys: sexual relationships between white mistresses and their male slaves and the offspring such unions often produced. Dove weaves the story of Oedipus into her account of a white woman, Amalia, her African American lover, Hector, and their offspring, Augustus. The mingling of Greek tragedy and American history effectively shows not only the tragic consequences of slavery but also the suffering that stems from jealousy, pride, and deception, no matter where or when stories take place or lives are lived.

Since her first book, The Yellow House on the Corner (l980), Dove has taken her readers on extraordinary journeys into what she describes as "her poetic consciousness of occupied space --of the space we inhabit, of the shape and pressure of absence" (The Poet's World). According to Dove, to inhabit "space with thought is analogous to the notion that language is a house we inhabit--a poet explores those spaces of sensual apprehension made inhabitable by vocabulary and syntax" (The Poet's World).

Dove listens to and recreates sounds others seem not to hear. Her fiction, poetry, drama, and essays are standing invitations to enter her linguistic house, an intimate, homey yet also extraordinary space. While there we can explore life, death, love and loss; we can hear voices history has not recorded and understand the need for compassion and forgiveness because of the cost bigotry has exacted from us all. Most importantly, her works, because they dwell in the timeless world of art and the imagination, have the power to unite individuals, cultures, as well as the past, present and future. Perhaps more than any other contemporary writer, Rita Dove understands the true value of multiculturalism because she has found her place.

Personal Information

Born: Rita Frances Dove in Akron, Ohio, 28 August 1952.
Address: Department of English, 219 Bryan Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903.
Education: Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, B.A. (summa cum laude) 1973; University of Tubingen, West Germany, 1974-75; University of Iowa, Iowa City, M.F.A. 1977.
Family: Married Fred Viebahn in 1979; one daughter.

Career:

• Research assistant, 1975, and teaching assistant, 1976-77, University of Iowa
• assistant professor of creative writing, 1981-84, associate professor, 1984-87, professor of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, 1987-89
• since 1989 professor of English, and since 1993 Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
• International Working Period for Authors Fellow, North-Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Culture and Univeristat Bielefeld, l980
• writer-in-residence, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, 1982
• chair, poetry grants panel, National Endowment for the Arts, l985
• Rockefeller Foundation residency, Bellagio, Italy, 1988
• member of editorial board, National Forum, 1984-89
• associate editor, Callaloo, since 1986
• advisory editor, Gettysburg Review, since 1987, Triquarterly, since 1988, Ploughshares, since 1990, The Georgia Review, since 1994, and Bellingham Review since 1996
• member of advisory board, Iris, since 1989 and Civilization, since 1994
• Commissioner, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, since 1987
• member of board of directors, Associated Writing Programs, 1985-88 (president 1986-87)
• member of advisory board, North Carolina Writers' Network since 1991, and U.S. Civil War Center, since 1995
• since 1994, member, Council of Scholars, Library of Congress, and Awards Council, American Academy of Achievement
• final judge, Walt Whitman award, 1990, and Brittingham & Pollak prizes, 1997
• juror, Ruth Lilly prize, National Book award for poetry, and Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1991, Anisfield-Wolf Book awards since 1992, Newman's Own/First Amendment award, PEN American Center, 1994, and Shelley Memorial award, Amy Lowell travelling fellowship, 1997
• chair, poetry jury, Pulitzer Prize, 1997
• consultant, Woman to Woman, Lifetime TV
• member, Afro-American Studies Visiting Committee, Harvard Univresity, Council of Scholars, Library of Congress, National Launch Commitee, Americorps
• senator, Phi Beta Kappa.

Awards

• Fulbright fellowship, 1974-75
• National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1978, fellowship, 1982, 1989
• Ohio Arts Council grant, 1979
• Guggenheim fellowship, 1983
• Lavan Younger Poets award, 1986
• Pulitzer Prize, 1987, for Thomas and Beulah
• Mellon fellowship, 1988-89
• Ohioana awards for Grace Notes, 1990, for Selected Poems, 1994
• named New York Public Library "Literary Lion," 1991
• Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa poet, 1993
• Virginia College Stores Association Book award, 1993, for Through the Ivory Gate
• Glamour magazine Women of the Year Award, 1993
• NAACP Great American Artist Award, 1993
• Folger Shakespeare Library Renaissance Forum award for leadership in the literary arts, 1994
• American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award, 1994
• International Platform Association Carl Sandburg Award, 1994
• W. Alton Jones Foundation grant, 1994
• Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award, 1995, for The Darker Face of the Earth
• Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, 1996
• The White House/National Endowment for the Humanities Charles Frankel Prize, 1996
• U.S. Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry, Library of Congress, 1993-95
• H.D.L. from Miami University, 1988
• Knox College, 1989
• Tuskegee University, University of Miami, Florida, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, Case Western Reserve University, and University of Akron, all 1994
• Arizona State University, Boston College, and Dartmouth College, all 1995
• Spelman College, and University of Pennsylvania, both 1996
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Notre Dame, both 1997.

Publications

Poetry Collections

• Ten Poems. Lisbon, Iowa, Penumbra Press, 1977.
• The Only Dark Spot in the Sky. Tempe, Inland Porch, 1980.
• The Yellow House on the Corner. Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1980.
• Mandolin. Athens, Ohio Review, 1982.
• Museum. Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1983.
• Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986.
• The Other Side of the House. Tempe, Pyracantha Press, 1988.
• Grace Notes. New York, Norton, 1989.
• Selected Poems. New York, Pantheon, 1993.
• Lady Freedom among Us. West Burke, Vermont, Janus Press, 1994.
• Mother Love. New York, Norton, 1995.

Short Story Collection

Fifth Sunday. Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1985.

Plays

• The Siberian Village. In Callaloo (Charlottesville, Virginia), vol. 14, no. 2, 1991.
• The Darker Face of the Earth (verse drama; produced Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 1996). Brownsville, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1994; completely revised second edition, 1996.

Novel

Through the Ivory Gate. New York, Pantheon, 1992.

Essay Collection

The Poet's World. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1995.

On-Line Projects

Lady Freedom Among Us. http://www.lib.virginia.edu/etext/fourmill.html

Musical Collaborations

• Between Sisters, with composer Alvin Singleton, 1990
• Rita Dove Tryptich, with composer Sabin Pautza, 1994
• Sing'n Sepia, with composer Tania Leon, 1996
• Umoja--Each One of Us Counts, with composer Alvin Singleton, 1996
• Grace Notes, with composer Bruce Adolphe, 1997
• Seven for Luck, with composer John Williams, 1997.

Recordings

• Video--"Our Voices," Black Entertainment TV, l992 "A Conversation with Poet Laureate Rita Dove," Library of Congress, l993
• "Who's Afraid of Poetry?," National Press Club, C-Span and NPR, l994
• "Shine Up Your Words: A Morning with Rita Dove," Virginia Center for the Book, l994
• "Poet Laureate Rita Dove," Bill Moyers' Journal, Public Affairs Television, Inc., 1994.
• Audio--Poets in Person: Rita Dove with Helen Vendler, Chicago, Modern Poetry Association, 1991.

Critical Studies

• "A Conversation with Rita Dove" by Stan Rubin and Earl Ingersoll, in Black American Literature Forum (Terre Haute, Indiana), vol. 20, no.6, Fall 1986
• "The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove" by Robert McDowell, in Callaloo (Charlottesville, Virginia), vol. 9, no. 1, 1986
• "The Poems of Rita Dove" by Arnold Rampersand, in Callaloo, vol. 9, no. 1, 1986
• "Scars and Wings: Rita Dove's Grace Notes" by Bonnie Costello, in Callaloo, vol. 14, no. 2, 1991
• "Rita Dove: Crossing Boundaries" by Ekaterini Gorgoudaki, in Callaloo, vol. 14, no. 2, 1991
• "Rita Dove's Mother Love: A Discussion," edited by Mark Edmundson, Mark, Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters, Winter l996.

Source: Contemporary Southern Writers. St. James Press, 1999.