Rita Dove, The Art of Poetry No. 113

Rita Dove

Rita Dove, The Art of Poetry No. 113
Interviewed by Kevin Young
Issue 243, Spring 2023


With her husband, Fred Viebahn, in Gummersbach, Germany, 1977. Courtesy of Rita Dove.

I first encountered Rita Dove in Essence magazine, where I learned that she’d won the 1987 Pulitzer for her book Thomas and Beulah (1986)—the first Black poet to be so awarded since Gwendolyn Brooks nearly four decades before. As a Black high schooler in Kansas who wrote poetry, or tried to, I distinctly remember wondering why no one had come to my door to inform me personally of this achievement—though I suppose the magazine, which then published poetry in its pages, had in fact done as much.

Thomas and Beulah was a revelation. Written in lines musical, freighted, and precise, Dove’s sequence of poems about her grandparents’ marriage is shadowed by the Great Migration, World War II, and the civil rights movement. That book’s grand theme—the intimacy of history—courses through Dove’s oeuvre, starting with her debut, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), and 1983’s Museum, a powerful collection that includes a poem called “Parsley,” which tells of the Dominican Republic leader Rafael Trujillo’s mass murder of Haitians on the pretext of “a single, beautiful word.” Dove’s ability to
evoke a deadly dictator with irony and complexity is reminiscent of Milton’s sympathy for the devil in Paradise Lost or W. H. Auden’s damning “Epitaph on a Tyrant.”

Dove’s first four books of poetry appeared at three-year intervals, a pace that slowed only slightly with Mother Love (1995) and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). Both refract her experiences of parenthood—she and her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn, have a daughter, Aviva—and of serving as the United States poet laureate, a role she occupied from 1993 to 1995, and which she transformed from what was once simply called the consultant in poetry into the prominent position it is today. Those early volumes, intertwined much as Lucille Clifton’s are, add up to an everyday epic that tells of the ways that public history is created through private lives—especially Black ones, which is still a revolutionary idea. Along the way, Dove finds kin in a variety of figures: an unnamed “House Slave,” sideshow performers in Berlin, Billie Holiday and Hattie McDaniel, Persephone and Demeter, a trickster “Spring Cricket.” She has also written several proper epics, including the symphonic Sonata Mulattica (2009), about the violinist George Bridgetower, the original dedicatee of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and, in Dove’s reimagining, a nexus from which to examine music, memory, racism, and underappreciated talent. As she writes of Holiday: “If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”

In her poetry—and in her work as a playwright, novelist, short story writer, and editor—Dove considers what it means to be far from home as well as to feel at home. Her places are many: her native Akron, Ohio, but also Germany, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar and where Viebahn is from, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she’s taught for more than three decades. Our conversations, peppered with Dove’s knowing laughter, took place over three consecutive days, the first of them in the Library of Congress’s Poetry Room, which serves as the laureate’s office. It was a full-circle moment for Dove, who was that evening to receive the library’s 2022 lifetime achievement Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. At the ceremony, she read from the elegant, pointed poems in her most recent book, Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021), in which she first revealed having multiple sclerosis to her readers. Her sense of humor, never enough commented on, was in full force—as was her training both as an opera singer and, more recently, a ballroom dancer. Her carriage, as ever, was impeccable, her work woven through with jazz, with the pleasures and silences of language.

Given that she and her husband are both famous night owls who often work till dawn, our midday meetings, early for her, were particularly generous. We spent our next two days at the dining room table of her Charlottesville home, where, in 1998, a devastating fire destroyed many of her papers, which she had gathered in her attic with the intention of later placing in a university archive. It seems important to note that our discussion of memory and personal history took place in a town where Confederate monuments and violent racist marches have jeopardized our faith in the power of those very things.

INTERVIEWER

When did you learn that a poem doesn’t have to rhyme?

DOVE

I cut my teeth on a Louis Untermeyer anthology at home, which had some free verse in it. I was drawn to Whitman—that voice, practically bursting with ecstasy!—and to Allen Ginsberg, who wasn’t taught in school because he was considered decadent, and who could be jazzy and syncopated even while mourning, as in “Kaddish,” or accusatory, as in “Howl.” I discovered William Carlos Williams, too—these were poems that did not intimidate me.

Mostly, I remember being somewhat frightened of poetry, and feeling deficient, especially in secondary school. I had no problem with Shakespeare’s plays, but the sonnets—I didn’t know how to talk about them. When I read Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge,” I wanted to be thoroughly engrossed in its beautiful, surging language, but I was baffled by the setting. I had never seen a seagull, I couldn’t envision a pier serving urban traffic. I didn’t know what New York looked like. The first time I went there was in 1976, with Fred.

INTERVIEWER

How did you get over your fear of poetry?

DOVE

I was in AP English from seventh grade on, and I and my classmates were afraid of being wrong, of not having that one “right” interpretation. In ninth grade we begged our teacher, Mr. Hicks, to teach us how to talk about poetry. He was impatient but finally seemed to acquiesce—he divided us up into groups of four or five and distributed snippets of poems to each group. We had until Friday to prepare presentations on them. He wouldn’t tell us who wrote the snippets or where they were from. My group got a passage that had ancient Greek in it and made no sense whatsoever. What were we going to do? We asked our parents, and they were all, What the heck are they teaching you there? In the end, we decided to go with our gut and just say whatever came to mind. I remember reporting that the poem was meant to appear to be from antiquity, and that we were supposed to not quite understand it. After our presentation, Mr. Hicks said, “Well, some of the leading critics agree with your interpretation …” and read us an excerpt from an essay on Ezra Pound. So that lopped off some of the fear, and we started breathing again.

At that time, I also started studying German—Akron had a sizable German population, so our teacher was a native speaker. I realized that figuring out how to talk about poetry was, in some ways, similar to thinking in another language—with practice it was something I could master but, ultimately, true understanding of a poem happened on a level beyond words. It was untranslatable.


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At home with her father before church, Akron, Ohio, 1955. Courtesy of Rita Dove.

INTERVIEWER

What was it like to grow up in Akron?

DOVE

I thought of it as a place of great invention. Part of that had to do with seeing what my father was doing in the Goodyear laboratory as a chemist—busy figuring out new ways to keep racing tires from exploding or burning out. He was my personal George Washington Carver. The Akron of my childhood was still full of vibrancy and promise, not yet rusting out. It was a node, a portage—tires rolled out of Akron and on to Detroit. It was a great town for watching everything from all sides—a place between the North and the South, between liberal and conservative. Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in Akron, in 1851. John Brown’s house is there, not far from where the city established a Rita Dove Lane about a decade ago. Luckily, LeBron takes some of the heat off me!

INTERVIEWER

Thomas and Beulah makes me think that your extended family was a big part of your life growing up. Is that right?

DOVE

Yes, many of them lived in Akron. After my grandfather Thomas died, in 1966, my family arranged it so that one of us would always be staying with my grandmother. Her name, by the way, was not Beulah but Georgianna—too awkward for the title of a poetry book.  I was thirteen or so—too young to date—so I was assigned weekends. She would reminisce about things I’d never heard her mention when my grandfather was alive. One story was about how my grandfather had come up from Tennessee with his friend Lem—and that was the story that inspired Thomas and Beulah.

INTERVIEWER

What was the story?

DOVE

Thomas and Lem were a song and dance duo—my grandfather sang, and Lem plucked his mandolin. They were fleeing their hometown of Wartrace, Tennessee, because of a lynching—and found work on a Mississippi banana boat. One day, standing on deck, they saw a chestnut tree on a little island nearby. My grandfather challenged his friend to fetch some chestnuts. Lem swam over, but when he started to climb, the island sank. He was sucked into the river, and my grandfather back on deck had to keep going on, working the northbound boats from river to river until he ended up in Ohio, which is almost as far as you can go before you hit Canada. Thomas was a very quiet, sweet man who seemed a little haunted, so the story made sense emotionally—but I kept wondering, How does an island sink? And my grandmother would answer, in that don’t-even-think-about-talking-back tone of voice, “It just did.” To my teenage ears, it sounded like something out of a fairy tale.

It’s funny—although Thomas and Beulah is based on my maternal grandparents, whose stories my family members used to embroider with each telling so that they became wilder year by year, I find myself increasingly fascinated by my father’s family history. He was a very self-protective man—he kept a shield around himself. After Thomas and Beulah, I think he was afraid I was going to write about his mother, who became pregnant at fourteen or fifteen—traded off to my grandfather pretty much as payment for a lost card game—and then had at least ten children, six girls and four boys. To me, hers was the ultimate story of perseverance and heroism. This was a family that could have gone completely under.

My father and some of his siblings believed survival depended on not letting the world see your struggle. None of my aunts or uncles were as educated as my father—his older brothers worked the assembly line or other menial jobs at Goodyear—and they didn’t quite know how to talk to him sometimes. When I was thirteen or fourteen, one of my much older cousins, who’d just gotten out of jail, had heard that I was studious and handed me a paperback, which was about a pimp—

INTERVIEWER

Iceberg Slim?

DOVE

It might have been. All I remember is feeling elated that she recognized how much I loved to read, but also thinking, This book is not for me.

We went to my father’s mother’s house every Sunday. Even as a child I realized that we lived in different worlds. I enjoyed both, but I knew the one I grew up in with my parents—the universe of education and literature—was where I was going to thrive.


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Akron, 1968. Courtesy of Rita Dove.

INTERVIEWER

What were the books in your house, and what were you reading?

DOVE

Early on I read whatever my brother, Tommy, was reading. He had subscriptions to Amazing Stories and to Fantasy and Science Fiction, so I read Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. Later on, I scoured the library shelves. And of course we had Shakespeare, my mother’s love. She had graduated at sixteen, and in her day they learned by rote, so she would quote entire soliloquies, fitting them in at the right moment so I didn’t realize I was hearing Shakespeare until years later. She’d be tired and sigh “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”—and I thought that was her complaint!

I finished Shakespeare’s plays, then read all of Dostoyevsky in ninth grade, followed by my Hermann Hesse stage. Lots of other plays, too—O’Neill, Ionesco, radio dramas—stuff we didn’t read in class.

My father, bless his orderly scientific mind, had subscribed to Great Books of the Western World—

INTERVIEWER

With the shelf and everything?

DOVE

Yes, that little bespoke bookcase! And, before the war, he had bought an Italian and a German primer, both secondhand—he didn’t know which country he’d be deployed to, so he decided to teach himself both languages. He also bought Friedrich Schiller’s Song of the Bell, or Das Lied von der Glocke, which is a book-length poem about the difficult art of casting a bell, called bellfounding. It was printed in Fraktur, an old German typeface that I had trouble deciphering. But such an exquisite little book! I have it still. It was the book that made me want to learn German.

INTERVIEWER

How did your father become a chemist?

DOVE

He grew up on the east side of town, in sight of the rubber factories—you could smell it. He was the smartest kid in his class at East Akron High, which, by the way, was integrated—that was in the thirties! His family sacrificed a lot for him, his sisters unraveling old sweaters to knit him socks so he could go to school in winter—because he’d been chosen to lift the rest of them up. Which he did.

He started college at the University of Akron while working part time at Goodyear. Then the war intervened. The government was fast-tracking young scientists-to-be, so he was transferred to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but they hadn’t realized he was Black—what Black person could be good at chemistry?—and didn’t know what to do about lodging. So they gave him the entire third floor of a dorm to himself, and according to what he told my husband forty years later, he and his white college mates held their parties up there. Later, when he was sent to an army training camp in Louisiana, a similar thing happened—again the assumption he had to be white, again a place to himself, this time an officer’s cottage. Such were the ironies of racism and segregation!

By the time I was born he was an elevator operator at Goodyear, earning a master’s degree in chemistry and working toward his doctorate, but the expense of raising his young family without a better job dashed that ambition. The white high school classmates he had tutored in organic chemistry got jobs as chemists, but the company didn’t hire Negroes for white-collar positions, so he was the one taking them up and down in the elevator. Finally, his former principal used connections to lobby Goodyear on his behalf.

Mind you, I didn’t learn any of this until I was much older. When I asked why he hadn’t told us sooner, he said, “I didn’t want you to be bitter. Bitterness holds you back.”

INTERVIEWER

I remember all kinds of discrimination in my classrooms growing up, especially in Kansas. Was it the same in Akron?

DOVE

Oh, honey, I can’t even imagine Kansas! What’s strange is that, even though I didn’t have any Black teachers, I don’t remember significant discrimination at school. Black and white kids mingled. Nowadays, at our reunions, the DJs will ask, “What kind of class was this?” because we all get along—everybody’s up on the dance floor, doing the wobble! Looking back, I think it had to do with real estate. The west side of Akron was in a state of transition—we were the second Black family on our block—and though there was white flight, the white people hadn’t figured out where to flee to, so they were moving away slowly. When I entered Buchtel High, it was about one-third Black and two-thirds white, and by the time I left, the ratio was reversed. In tenth grade I tried out for the all-white majorettes because my friend Rhonda Mundy, who could really twirl, said, “Rita, let’s break this barrier.” But I also hoped it would make me popular. So we practiced all summer long, and we made the squad.

INTERVIEWER

Did you keep a journal back then?

DOVE

When I was ten, I got a diary as a gift, and I loved the little lock on it, but I wasn’t a diligent diarist. I kept a dream journal instead. The idea of writing down what I’d done that day seemed so terribly depressing—the antithesis of how a day should be experienced. Writing all that down would’ve shut the day off so that I couldn’t dream about it.

I did keep fashion journals, filling them with dress designs. My mother’s mother was a milliner, and during the Second World War my mother had worked as a seamstress. She made most of our clothes—we were always decked out. When Fred and I started dating, I showed him a family photo and his comment was, “Damn, you guys looked good.” I told him we hadn’t been rich, and he laughed. “Come on—look at those clothes!” he said. But my mother had made that beautiful dress I was wearing from the lining of a coat.

INTERVIEWER

Did you sew your own clothes?

DOVE

I did, all through high school, especially in my “Black Is Beautiful” phase. My father didn’t want me to have an Afro, but I did wear one, for playing in my jazz quintet, plucking away on my cello, swathed in all kinds of stuff. Hot pants with those maxi vests—what the heck was that about?

INTERVIEWER

It was groovy is what it was.

DOVE

Right on! I’ve been sewing for quite a while. I even made Fred’s lavender wedding suit. That sucker nearly killed me.

INTERVIEWER

So you were always creating and crafting—and making music. When did you know you wanted to write?

DOVE

As a tween, I decided to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe because we share a birthday, August 28. Admittedly, his massive oeuvre was a bit too public-oriented for my taste. He’s no Shakespeare, I thought, in my youthful arrogance. Looking back, I think I was reading him for clues—How does one become a writer?—but I wasn’t conscious of it, not for a long time. I wasn’t being discouraged—it’s just that “writer” wasn’t on the list of professions that could be a credit to the race. And there were almost no Black poets in the Untermeyer.
 

 

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Writing Through the Ivory Gate in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, summer 1978.  © Fred Viebahn, courtesy of Rita Dove.

INTERVIEWER

So when did you realize you were a poet?

DOVE

Well, at seventeen I was a U.S. Presidential Scholar, one of two from Ohio and a hundred-plus from the entire United States—in the same cohort as Merrick Garland—but I didn’t apply to any of the Ivy League schools, because no one told me I could. I chose Miami University of Ohio, near Cincinnati, because it was as far as I could get from Akron and still remain within the state. There was also a smattering of Black students there, and for the first time in my life, I felt included in a Black social group that was also intellectually inclined. I had tested out of freshman English, so I enrolled in Advanced Composition, but a few weeks into the term our professor fell ill, and Milton White took his place. That substitution changed my life. Milton White wrote fiction. He came strolling into the classroom—white-haired, openly gay, wearing an electric-blue Italian suit—and that was it! The next quarter I enrolled in his short-story workshop, and then I signed up for Jim Reiss’s poetry workshop. Poetry brought together everything I loved—language, music, my dream journals. I even enjoyed revising—the work that needs doing after that first glorious gush, which is when you find out what the gush is really all about. I loved seeing the revisions stack up.

Dan Flory, one of my German professors, suggested I apply for a Fulbright fellowship to Germany. When I protested that I wasn’t a German major, he replied that if I wanted to see the world, I should at least try to make up a translation project, so I did. The next spring, while waiting for the Fulbright to start, I attended a conference at my university. Daniel Halpern was one of the visiting writers. He read a few of my poems and asked if he could have them for his journal, Antæus. I didn’t really know anything about Halpern or his magazine, so I asked Jim Reiss, who said, “Oh my God—give them to him right now!” Halpern also published three of my poems in The American Poetry Anthology, which he was editing for HarperCollins, so I had secured two major publications before entering graduate school, without looking or trying for it.

INTERVIEWER

How would you describe those poems now?

DOVE

Free verse, surrealistic, probably a bit derivative. “Nigger Song: An Odyssey” was a poem about the ecstasy of being out at night driving with your friends, the joy of being who you are in the moment. Its cadences make a bow to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” and the ending’s a nod to Molly Bloom’s “yes I said yes I will Yes.” But I’ve come to suspect that the poem was probably accepted for the wrong reasons.

INTERVIEWER

The N-word, you mean?

DOVE

Yes. I’d meant the poem to be a celebration of belonging to a group where everyone using that word understood all its implications. Looking back, I feel that the poem was accepted because it was exotic—it could give the reader permission to embrace that word without censure.

If you were a young Black poet back then, the only way to write about Blackness, and the only viable path into the larger literary world, seemed to be via the Black Arts movement—which, almost out of necessity, focused on positive qualities that had been ignored or denied to Black people. Praise was the baseline, with claims of beauty and honor and strength. The problem was, because the movement had a more or less rigid agenda, it could not admit any ambiguities or contradictions. Now, The American Poetry Anthology came out just as I entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. One afternoon, the phone rang—it was Michael S. Harper. I was the only Black poetry student there since him in the early sixties, and he had also been published in the collection. He congratulated me, and then told me that he had just been at a reading from the anthology where there had been a bit of controversy. Alice Walker had refused to appear, claiming there was a racist poem in the book. When Harper pointed out that the poem was written by a Black woman, she’d said that it didn’t matter. I was devastated. I wrote to her explaining my thoughts and got a fairly ungenerous letter back saying, essentially, I don’t care what you think. It turned out that there was a lot of gossip swirling about the anthology at Iowa, attention I didn’t really care for. It set me apart.

INTERVIEWER

Who did you feel were your precursors at the time, if not the Black Arts poets?

DOVE

I liked Langston Hughes, though his poems were mostly laudatory and less about getting into people’s heads. I wanted to show that Black people had interior lives that no one could see, like everybody else. I loved Melvin B. Tolson, especially Harlem Gallery—he has such fun orchestrating all those voices and levels of diction, yet he still touches upon the melancholy of diaspora. At Iowa I read Robert Penn Warren’s Audubon: A Vision, for Stanley Plumly’s class on poetic sequences, and it did a number on me. That’s when I began writing the narratives of the enslaved in The Yellow House on the Corner and started on the track that ended up as Thomas and Beulah.

But would Thomas and Beulah have been possible without the Black Arts poets? By the time I had figured out how to write what I wanted to write, they had created and opened a door for me to walk through. And yet when I’d send poems out, I’d get responses from editors that they weren’t Black enough. There’s a poem in The Yellow House on the Corner addressed to Don L. Lee—who is now Haki R. Madhubuti—about a dream encounter in which I kill my forebears in order to forge my own path. Even though I thrilled to many of Lee’s poems, I also felt like I needed to get past his world and his worldview.


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Rita and Fred at their wedding party in Oberlin, Ohio, 1979. Courtesy of Rita Dove.

INTERVIEWER

The poet and novelist Clarence Major had a saying that we would quote in the Dark Room Collective: “Total life is what we want.”

DOVE

I told myself, Thank goodness those poets proclaimed Black is beautiful, because now I can talk about how Black is everything.

INTERVIEWER

What was your experience of workshop?

DOVE

Iowa was not a pleasant experience, yet some of the most important events of my life happened there—meeting Fred, and being taught by Stanley Plumly, who was frankly a savior. Joy Harjo and Sandra Cisneros were in the year right behind me, so we were in workshop together. People have imagined us having so much fun constantly discussing our work with one another, but in fact we were isolated by the hierarchies of Iowa and by worries that hanging out together would look like we were segregating ourselves—even though we were the only minority M.F.A. students at the time.

In workshop, I was often afraid that the issues and experiences important to me were not going to be critiqued seriously, and that I wouldn’t be strong enough to toss it off—that the damage would be irreparable. So I decided subconsciously—and sometimes consciously—not to expose my deepest self to that disregard. I think I turned in just three poems to workshop in my last semester—three! I wrote more, but I didn’t want to show them to the hyenas. I thought, Let me learn as much as I can, so I’ll be able to apply it to what matters to me later, without these malevolent voices nattering away. But even after leaving Iowa, I could still hear them clamoring, back in the cornfields. I think that’s why, after graduating in May of 1977, I started writing fiction. I loved German novellas like Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm and Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle—and I tried to write with a sense of that longer arc in the stories that eventually became Fifth Sunday (1985).

INTERVIEWER

Did you set out to write about the history of the Black Midwest in those stories, and in The Yellow House on the Corner?

DOVE

I worked on both of those books in Oberlin—Fred taught at the college, in the German department, for two years. We moved there in the fall, my favorite season, and the houses looked like they were navigating a little sea of leaves—hence the image of the yellow house as a galleon stranded in flowers.

INTERVIEWER

You mean the image in the last poem in the book?

DOVE

“Ö”?

INTERVIEWER

Yes, “O”—sorry, I don’t have German.

DOVE

The poem has the instructions in it. “Shape the lips to an o, say a.”

INTERVIEWER

“Ö.”

 

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At home in Tempe, Arizona, with her daughter, Aviva, 1984.  © Fred Viebahn, courtesy of Rita Dove.

DOVE

There it is! That image was my take on how Ohio is always aspiring to be a definitive “something” without ever quite getting there—it was once the frontier, once the plains, once the edge of everything.

Growing up a middle-class Black girl in the Midwest was completely different from what most of the Black Arts poets had experienced in the rural South or urban Northeast. Later, I worried about the kind of reception Thomas and Beulah—this quiet meditation about “ordinary” people who were Black—would get from a reading public used to seeing Black people depicted as drug addicts or militants.

Strangely, I think it was during my Fulbright year in southwestern Germany that I gathered the chutzpah to claim whatever world I was in as my world. That’s where I came across completely different ideas of the United States, of African Americans and what our lives must be like—ideas that might have been mistaken or inaccurate but were a very different kind of wrong from what white Americans thought. In the U.S. I would often be asked, “Why are you studying German?” and I would think, Why shouldn’t a Black person be able to speak German? Look at all the Black intellectuals who went to Germany—Angela Davis, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois.

INTERVIEWER

Did you translate poems during your Fulbright?

DOVE

Mostly after. Not many, though.

INTERVIEWER

Only a fool goes on a Fulbright and does what they’d proposed.

DOVE

So the saying goes! Mostly all I could see was where I’d failed. I’d start thinking about the amazing works of literature I’d read in translation and what I was missing out on because I didn’t know the original language. That kind of thinking can lead you down a rabbit hole of despair. There’s a translation of mine at the end of Playlist for the Apocalypse—a Goethe poem. Dan Flory, the same professor who convinced me to apply for a Fulbright, handed it to me on a little scrap of paper. “Put this in your wallet,” he said. “Read it every once in a while.” There I was, a twenty-year-old carrying around a poem that ends, “Just wait: before long / you, too, shall rest” … But I kept it in my wallet, and my attitude changed over time. It’s such a perfect poem in terms of craft—the rhymes, how it hovers above the mountaintops, then swoops down, settling in the trees. I’d been trying to translate it properly for forty years, and finally produced an acceptable version. But there are still problems with it.

INTERVIEWER

Your second book, Museum, is dedicated to nobody. Why?

DOVE

“For nobody / who made us possible.” By the end of the seventies, the museum of the world began opening its doors to me. Fred and I spent five months in Israel, then a year and a half in Germany. Back in Oberlin, I’d started working on a series of poems, which have never been collected in a book, that deal with the life of Albrecht Dürer. A fascinating man, who attempted to devise a system for quantifying beauty—the ideal facial shape, with the nose a certain distance from the forehead, all very mathematical—and yet was one of the few European painters of his time who depicted Africans accurately. His portrait of Katharina is a beautiful drawing of a young African servant woman—no exaggerated lips, crazy eyes, or anything like that. I was interested in this artist who longed to quantify beauty but who could also see clearly. I’d also been thinking about the implications when those in power deem objects from certain cultures as unworthy of being displayed in museums, just as there are people whose stories were not deemed important enough to make it into the history books. Of course, all the nobodies made all the somebodies possible.

INTERVIEWER

Museum contains a poem about another painting—Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove, by Christian Schad. How did that come about?

DOVE

Fred and I saw the painting when we were living in Berlin in 1980. It was part of a Schad retrospective in the Staatliche Kunsthalle. Agosta, the man in the painting, was considered a freak because of his physical deformities, but was also the object of intense medical study. Rasha’s only peculiarity was the color of her skin. I was struck by how both man and woman stare out and accuse the viewer. I wanted my poem to do that.

I learned from the exhibit catalogue that Schad was in his mid-eighties and living in a suburb of Aschaffenburg, a town on the Main River just southeast of Frankfurt. That fall I wrote the poem and Fred translated it for Litfass, a German lit mag. He encouraged me to send it to Schad, addressed simply to him in his suburb, without a street address. And lo and behold—a few days later I got a response from his wife, Bettina, expressing their admiration for the poem and inviting us to visit, which we did shortly thereafter. I remember that he kept looking at me, with his artist’s eyes, and Bettina took a number of photographs. Over coffee and cake, Schad asked for permission to paint me, which I granted, of course. The following year, when the manuscript of Museum had begun to gel into a book, I knew I needed that painting for the cover. So I wrote Schad to ask for his permission, and he and Bettina wrote back, “Of course,” from their winter home on Tenerife. Unfortunately, he died soon after, in early 1982.

INTERVIEWER

Don’t you think the woman in the painting looks like you? And she shares your name, Dove.

DOVE

I was dimly aware of it—she could’ve been my sister. Kismet! You’ve got to follow those signs. One does not look the muse in the eye and say, Ah, forget it.

 

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At center, Dove, with Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Octavio Paz, at a poet laureate reading in New York, 1993. © Fred Viebahn, courtesy of Rita Dove.

INTERVIEWER

“Parsley,” also in Museum, is one of your most haunting poems. How did you learn about the 1937 massacre it is inspired by?

DOVE

That was also when Fred and I were living in Berlin. Every Saturday we would go to Autorenbuchhandlung, a bookstore run by writers, for a champagne brunch. I’d listen to the literary gossip and let my eyes wander around the store. One day, a book called out from across the room—it had a stark white cover with a bright green slash of a title, Petersilie, by Hubert Fichte. Petersilie is the German word for parsley—the jacket flap referenced the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had executed scores of Haitians who were not able to roll the r in the Spanish word perejil. Could this be true? I immediately went to the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, my favorite library in Berlin, to look it up. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

Many of those Museum poems were born out of a feeling that someone or something was testifying to me. The book that shouted at me from across the room had a story to tell, a story that had been buried and lost. As always, my impulse upon learning something like that is to bear witness, and that means subsuming the self.

INTERVIEWER

Did the poem come easily? How did it find its form?

DOVE

The first part—a kind of a villanelle told from the perspective of the laborers—came relatively easily because of the repetition. The longer second part, which zooms in on the dictator, started out as a sestina, but I’d never written a good sestina before, so I gave up. I was still working on that damn poem when I got the job at Arizona State University in 1981. I think the problem was that I didn’t want to admit any kind of intimacy with Trujillo, but simply declaring “This man is a monster” would be too shallow. The two parts had to be about beauty and obsession, but in different ways.

I somehow got stuck on Trujillo’s parrot—I had to make sure a breed of parrot existed whose feathers were parsley green. Then one day in my first semester at ASU, a student called me right before class in a panic. She worked at a pet shop across town, and the person who had the next shift hadn’t come in yet. The store had recently acquired a new parrot—I kid you not—which she couldn’t leave unattended, so she was going to have to miss class. “Can you bring the parrot?” I asked, and she said, “Yeah, he’s trained enough.” She brought the bird, which was gray, to class, and it walked up and down the conference table picking up pencils and redistributing them. Everyone had a blast, and the student was very grateful, so I said, “There is one thing you could do for me. Find out if there’s a parrot that’s entirely green.” She came back next class with a picture of a green Australian parrot. Another breakthrough happened the day I grew so angry with the second part of the poem that I just wrote it all out in prose—and voilà! The sentences reshaped themselves into lines.

INTERVIEWER

Has writing about your family history required a different kind of research?


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With Toni Morrison at Maya Angelou’s house in North Carolina, celebrating Morrison’s Nobel Prize and Dove’s poet laureate appointment, 1994. © Fred Viebahn, courtesy of Rita Dove.

DOVE

Well, for a while in the early eighties, I sensed there was something more personal that I wasn’t ready to write down yet. I was haunted by the vanishing island story my grandmother had told me after my grandfather died, but I felt I couldn’t write about it unless I knew that it was true. When I lived in Oberlin, I did some research on the Mississippi River in the college library across the street from our house and learned that some of those river islands are just a snarl of vines—not real land. Lem must have gotten tangled up and gone down, probably from his own weight. Once I understood that the origin of the fairy tale had a realistic underpinning, I began wondering how my grandfather must have felt.

The only source material I had was what I remembered of my grandparents, plus the tidbits my mother had told me. I would call her once a week, long-distance from Arizona, and ask her questions. Some of Beulah’s moments are versions of what my mother went through. On one of our calls, she mentioned that when we were kids, she used to go sit in the car, in the garage, to hide from us. I remembered how we’d be looking for her—the four of us going, “Where’s Mom?”—and she said, “Sometimes you just need five minutes for yourself.” I knew that from my own experience, too. Even though Fred and I really divided up the tending of our daughter, Aviva—he would do four hours, I would do four hours—there were times when I just wanted to go somewhere and disappear. All of that turned into Beulah’s memory in “Daystar,” where I imagine my grandmother sitting behind the lean-to. Beulah chooses to be invisible in the middle of the day, and by being “pure nothing” she’s also saying, I need to come to myself—in a sense, it’s her version of Zen meditation. She’s saying, I need to keep all of you people away, all of you with your expectations of who I am, which is not who I am.


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Dancing the tango with Fred at a ballroom dance showcase in Charlottesville, Virginia, 2002. Courtesy of Rita Dove.

INTERVIEWER

Did the poems come in order, or did you write Thomas, then Beulah?

DOVE

When I started, I thought the Thomas poems and the Beulah poems would alternate so that the narratives would intertwine, responding to each other tit for tat. But then I realized that structure didn’t correspond to what my grandparents’ lives were like. This was the story of two people who come together and learn to respect the fact that each has separate thoughts. For Thomas, the biggest event in his life may well have been when he got on that riverboat, but Beulah’s big event might have occurred later down the line—or maybe she has no big event, just a bunch of little ones. I didn’t write chronologically, and I didn’t write one section in its entirety and then move on to the next. There was counterpoint, but it wasn’t quite a call-and-response—maybe more of a double helix.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any qualms about writing about your relatives?

DOVE

I had no concerns about my family reading Thomas and Beulah until Akron decided to hold a Rita Dove Day, on October 1, 1987, after I won the Pulitzer. The school district bused in all these kids for a presentation and reading at the University of Akron’s E. J. Thomas Hall, which holds around three thousand people. They also recorded it for broadcast on Ohio PBS stations and had hired a local emcee to orchestrate the event. He used the old TV show This Is Your Life as a frame. We’d start with a total blackout, and then a spotlight would come down on a relic from my life—my majorette baton, say. The final “artifacts” were my parents, sitting onstage in straight-backed chairs. I almost had a meltdown the night before. I kept thinking, Everybody I know from my childhood is going to be there, including my relatives, who do not understand poetry—but they will know when facts are wrong, and they might get loud. You know—It wasn’t like that at all! But afterward one of my aunts came up to me and said, “That’s exactly how it happened. I remember it all.”

I think my family was proud that I had told these stories. They understood that the point wasn’t the details but in the truth behind them—the story of everything working-class people have undergone to try to snag a little piece of what we call the American dream.

But there have been times when I’ve decided to wait. Mark Strand once gave me a valuable bit of advice—he said that everything is permissible in poetry except for an attack on yourself, adding that I could interpret that advice in many ways. One interpretation is that if you write—and more importantly, choose to publish—something that may hurt somebody you love, you have to take their emotions into account. Some might say that a person’s response to what you write about them is their problem, but that’s not completely right—it’s an assault on your psyche, too, because it affects your relationship with them. I held off writing about my father’s mother for that reason.

INTERVIEWER

Will you write about her?

DOVE

I hope so. In fact, after Thomas and Beulah, she wanted to tell her story. She asked Fred if he would record her, so we visited her two days in a row with a video camera running. She didn’t want my father to know, but he eventually found out and wasn’t happy. He didn’t demand to see any of the footage—just pretended that it hadn’t happened. But I got the memo, and I said to myself, I’m not going to harm my father for the sake of poetry.

INTERVIEWER

Are you a confessional poet in hiding, though?

DOVE

I’m a firm believer in tricking myself as I write. Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.

Craft allows me to open myself to the page—allows the emotions, the confessions, to infuse the work. When I found myself digging into the Persephone and Demeter myth for Mother Love, I was so focused on the archetypes, trying to give these mythic figures an intimate life—in sonnets, no less—that at first I didn’t realize I was writing about the fear of my own child being abducted, of her loss of innocence.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written a lot about fame and isolation and race—in poems like “Canary” and in Sonata Mulattica. Are those poems autobiographical, too?

DOVE

A curious thing happens when you’re in the public eye, as I’ve been since I was poet laureate—people get upset if you do not match up with what they expect of you. I was feeling my way through all that in Sonata Mulattica—how George Bridgetower deals with the ebullience of early fame, his self-consciousness as he acts out the part of the admired artist, his thoughts while he’s busy saying things like, Thank you, ma’am. Even his father’s admonitions regarding how to dress in order to satisfy an audience’s sensibilities … I remember having debates with other poets when I was starting out about whether one should wear a dress for a reading. At the time, women poets rarely wore skirts for fear of appearing too feminine—you needed to look strong.

At first, I resisted the idea of Sonata Mulattica. I thought it was too much like Thomas and Beulah and Mother Love—that people would say, Oh, Dove is doing her sequences again. I don’t like to be put in any kind of box—I like it when my audience can’t figure out what to call me or my poetry, because I can’t figure that out, either. I mourned when I finished Sonata Mulattica because I understood George Bridgetower, and I missed him.

INTERVIEWER

Your previous book, American Smooth (2004), had been written in the wake of a terrible misfortune. Will you tell us about the fire? How did it affect your work?

 

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Working on Sonata Mulattica outside her motor home in Adelaide, Australia, 2005. © Fred Viebahn, courtesy of Rita Dove.

DOVE

Well, yes—it happened in 1998. By that time, several university libraries had expressed interest in my archive, but I’d put off gathering my papers and memorabilia—folders and boxes stuffed into various locations—because I didn’t want to look back on my life. It had taken a while to marshal my energy because I’d recently been diagnosed with MS, and fatigue was one of the unpleasant side effects. But I’d done it—I’d gone home to my parents’ house in Akron and gotten much of my early stuff, even the comic books my brother and I had made as children, and I put them in our attic in Virginia—and then lightning struck.

We had just come home from taking our daughter back to college. It was shortly after 10 P.M. on Labor Day, the first storm after a long dry spell. There was a horrible boom when a lightning bolt struck the chimney and the roof right above Fred’s study. It knocked him across the room, and the lights went out. We stumbled around in the dark, and then I said, “Why am I looking at stars?” That’s when we realized that there was a jagged lightning-shaped hole in the wall. We went out into the hallway trying to find a flashlight and heard a crackling noise, growing louder. It was the fire burning up all the Akron memorabilia in the attic. We saw the orange rim of the flames licking the attic’s trapdoor, and we got out.

The firefighters saved a lot of what was on the first floor, photo albums and artwork, as well as the archival stuff in the basement and garage, carrying it outside and covering it with tarps before the water got to it—they pumped thousands of gallons into the building—but the whole second floor was lost. Of course, a huge chunk of my past vanished in the fire. But I decided not to think about it, and I sometimes still need to force myself not to think about it, because it’s gone. It’s gone. What can you do but take refuge in the positive that came out of it, in a certain way—and that was ballroom dancing!

I believe that if you’re a poet and there is something you are passionate about, regardless of what it is, it will nourish the poetry. A few days after the fire, I remember going off to buy some clothes and realizing in the store that I had to start from scratch, with new underwear and a new bra. I burst into tears and turned around. Then our neighbors invited us to a benefit event with social dancing, and the first articles in my new wardrobe were a ball gown and heels.

The dancing brought me back to writing in a spirit of joy. The first poem I wrote for American Smooth was “Fox Trot Fridays.” We suddenly had a whole new set of friends who had nothing to do with writing—the only thing that mattered was, Can you dance? Meanwhile, the dancing helped with the MS, too, because it was good for my balance.

As they say, Living well is the best revenge. I had survived—so why not go all out? I sewed the dresses I’d always wanted to wear but hadn’t dared because I was a “serious poet” and an academic—pink sequins, that sort of thing. I’ll say to Fred, “How did we do all that and still write?” I was elbow-deep in taffeta and still writing. I’d be lacing up a corset and have to dash off to my room to tighten up a stanza. Sometimes I’d give up on a draft, turn to my sewing machine, and in the middle of stitching a seam would find the solution for an enjambment. When I consider how hard it can be to set a sleeve into a garment, all those nips and tucks that help it fit around that curve, I think perhaps putting together a dress isn’t so different from composing a poem like “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove.”

 

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At the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2019. © Fred Viebahn, courtesy of Rita Dove.

INTERVIEWER

How has your MS changed your writing process?

DOVE

I wrote my novel on a manual typewriter. Fred and I packed two of them in the back of his old Ford and drove from Germany across Europe. I had always written poetry by hand, jotted in notebooks—a line here, a word or half a stanza there. Then I would move to college-ruled pages, which would get paper-clipped together and filed in colored folders, so that when I went back to them to write I could say, without clear intention, Maybe I’ll open the blue folder today. Fragments were my way of organizing my thoughts. At some point, I would be able to hear the shape of a poem without knowing what it looked like. I hadn’t really realized this was how I worked until I could no longer do it. One of the ramifications of MS is that the scar tissue causes short-circuiting, and now my hands will jerk when doing repetitive movements—which I can’t control. I have to compose on the computer, which I don’t like when it comes to poetry, or dictate, which might be beneficial for the music of the poem, but it also means I hear it a little too loudly.

INTERVIEWER

What time of day do you write?

DOVE

Fred and I both write at night—it’s what accelerated our relationship after we met at Iowa. He came as a Fulbright Scholar and was to give a lecture about contemporary German literature, which I had volunteered to translate. There was a big party to welcome all the fellows, and Fred turned up straight from the airport in a burgundy leather jacket and matching boots he’d just bought that summer at the Porta Portese market in Rome. He likes to tell everybody, “There was this pretty girl who welcomed me in perfect German, no accent.” He was pretty cute, too, and he said, “Well, we’ll have to work out a schedule for translating my lecture.”

INTERVIEWER

That is such a good play.

DOVE

Yes, a good one! He suggested that we do it in the evening, but I told him that I would be busy with my own work until about four in the morning. His response, not missing a beat—he was up at night, too, and he was going to call at four to check if I was really awake. At that point, I thought he was a bit arrogant, but I was used to that kind of arrogance from Germans. And sure enough, he called, and I liked him better on the phone. Every morning for a week or two, we’d speak for an hour on the phone and then go to sleep in our respective beds, a couple of miles apart. Then one weekend, there was an International Writing Program party in Des Moines, and that’s when he made his move.

INTERVIEWER

Do you both still work into the early hours?

DOVE

The typical writing night has evolved. We developed a ritual early on, especially when we traveled—we would have dinner at about eleven, and around midnight we would go off to write in our separate rooms. When the sun came up, it was time to get a croissant for breakfast, and then we went to bed. These days, I try to ambush the work whenever I can. I’ll wander into my room and answer emails, or spread some stuff on the table, and then the poems will just slide in. I’m sorry not to have those more regimented writing days and nights anymore. But there are still times when I look up and it’s six in the morning.

INTERVIEWER

Do you show people your work in progress? Are you part of a writing group?

DOVE

I exchanged poems with one of my colleagues at Arizona State back in the eighties, but when I won the Pulitzer, he started wearing sunglasses and I never saw his eyes again. Getting the prize at thirty-four meant I could no longer talk to my peers about the things I was struggling with—and if I critiqued their work, I feared it would sound as though I was pontificating.

Fred is my reader, and I only show him something when it’s pretty much what I think it’s going to be. We have a couple of rules. Rule number one is, Don’t look at anything over the other’s shoulder, or sneak into their room to peek at drafts. Another rule is that you can’t respond to critical notes for twenty-four hours. No protests—take the critique, live with it for a day. I think that rule can save a marriage.

INTERVIEWER

Have there been big disagreements?

DOVE

Before Playlist for the Apocalypse, the big disagreement was that I had stopped publishing, which drove Fred crazy. The gap between that book and Sonata was the longest interval between any of my books, and I really felt it. I had begun writing poems about the MS—scraps, but not putting them together.

INTERVIEWER

Why weren’t you publishing?

DOVE

I gave myself lots of excuses—there were too many people listening, I was trying to figure out how to write again, with MS. At first I didn’t tell anyone about my illness—only Fred knew. It had become impossible to tell my parents because they were so old and ailing. Aviva found out only because I left “Soup” in my printer by accident. I woke up one morning to her standing in front of our bed with tears in her eyes, holding up the poem.

I didn’t want to deal with people’s pity. I realized that if I sent poems out to magazines before I was done with the book, the noise would start up again, and I needed quiet and calm to be able to finish the damn thing. Then two things happened. There was the pandemic, which was an odd blessing—I had been complaining to Fred that we were constantly traveling, and suddenly everything was canceled. Then my parents died, so I no longer had to worry that they’d find out. These days, when I read “Soup” aloud, it feels almost like a love poem to my mother.

INTERVIEWER

The mid-nineties must have been your noisiest period. Looking back, was there a particular theme of your laureateship? Or was the theme, I’m busier than ever, and I’m the public face of poetry?

DOVE

There was a lot of press around it, of course, and I got inundated with letters because it was still paper letter time. The correspondents were all over the place. I mean, all over the place—teenagers and lawyers and housewives and beauticians. It was amazing. Often, the writer would confess that they were afraid of poetry or didn’t know much about it, and then they would continue with beautifully rendered descriptions of the first time that they read a poem or which poems mattered to them. I was like, You think you don’t understand poetry? Of course you do—but why are you afraid of it? What happened, and what can I do? So that became my mission—What can I do? It was a haphazard enterprise, but forward-looking all the same. I just decided I would bring poetry to people wherever I could, whenever I could. That meant meeting Air Force Academy cadets as well as going to grade schools. There’s always a poem you can present—but it was exhausting. I’d say it took a year and a half of extreme busyness until I figured out how to go with the flow and not get overly agitated.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the landscape of American poetry has changed since then?

DOVE

I do, and it’s stunning. Part of that is definitely caused by the proliferation of writing programs—a whole bunch of people becoming sensitized to poetry because they want to be poets themselves. There’s been a swell of poetry, no matter the cries of naysayers. But what’s very important about this trend is that this democratization of poetry is simultaneously a diversification, so voices that had been kept out, suppressed by self-appointed gatekeepers, have now made it inside. When I look back on it, I’m proud that I’ve helped contribute to what’s happening today. It’s hard to say that kind of stuff about oneself without sounding like you’re bragging, but it’s true.

the paris review