Dove, Rita (Frances)
DOVE, Rita (Frances)
Nationality: American. Born: Akron, Ohio, 28 August 1952. Education: Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, B.A. (summa cum laude) 1973 (Phi Beta Kappa); University of Tübingen, West Germany (Fulbright/Hays fellow), 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. Writer-in-residence, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, 1982; Rockefeller Foundation residency, Bellagio, Italy, 1988. Member of the editorial board, National Forum, 1984–89; advisory editor, 1987–92, and associate editor, 1989–98, Callaloo; advisory editor, Gettysburg Review, 1987–92; editor since 1988, Tri-Quarterly, since 1990 Ploughshares, and since 1994 The Georgia Review. Since 1987 commissioner, Schomburg Center for the Preservation of Black Culture, New York Public Library. Member of the Board of Directors, Associated Writing Programs, 1985–88 (president 1986–87); member of the advisory board, North Carolina Writers' Network, 1991–99; since 1994 member, Council of Scholars, Library of Congress. Final judge, Walt Whitman award, 1990; juror, Ruth Lilly prize, National Book award (poetry), and Pulitzer prize in poetry, 1991, Newman's Own/First Amendment award, PEN American Center, 1994, and since 1992 Anisfield-Wolf Book awards. U.S. Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry, Library of Congress, 1993–95. Awards: Fulbright fellowship, 1974–75; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1978, fellowship, 1982; Ohio Arts Council grant, 1979; Guggenheim fellowship, 1983; Lavan Younger Poets award, 1986; Pulitzer prize for Thomas and Beulah, 1987; Mellon fellowship, 1988–89. National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship, 1989; Ohioana award for Grace Notes, 1990, for Selected Poems, 1994; "Literary Lion," New York Public Library, 1991, Phi Beta Kappa poet, Harvard University, 1993; Virginia College Stores Association Book award for Through the Ivory Gate, 1993; Women of the Year award, Glamour magazine, 1993; NAACP Great American Artist award, 1993; Renaissance Forum award for leadership in the literary arts, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994; Golden Plate award, American Academy of Achievement, 1994; Carl Sandburg award, International Platform Association, 1994; Fund for New American Plays grant, Kennedy Center, 1995; Charles Frankel prize, 1996; National Medal in the Humanities, 1996; Heinz award in the arts and humanities, 1996; Levinson prize, Poetry, 1998. U.S. Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry, Library of Congress, 1993–95. H.D.L.: Miami University, 1988; Knox College, 1989; Tuskegee University, Alabama, 1994; University of Miami, Florida, 1994; Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, 1994; Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, 1994; University of Akron, Ohio, 1994. Address: Department of English, Bryan Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
Ten Poems. Lisbon, Iowa, Penumbra Press, 1977.
The Only Dark Spot in the Sky. Tempe, Arizona, Inland Porch, 1980.
The Yellow House on the Corner. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1980.
Mandolin. Athens, Ohio Review, 1982.
Museum. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, and London, Feffer and Simons, 1983.
Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986.
The Other Side of the House. Tempe, Arizona, 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.
Evening Primrose. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Tunheim-Santrizos, 1998.
On the Bus with Rosa Parks. New York, Norton, 1999.
Plays
The Siberian Village. In Callaloo (Charlottesville, Virginia), 14(2), 1991.
The Darker Face of the Earth (produced Ashland, Oregon, 1996; London, 1999). Ashland, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1994; revised edition, Ashland, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1996; revised edition, London, Oberon Press, 1999.
Musicals: The House Slave, music by Alvin Singleton (produced Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, 1990); Under the Resurrection Palm, with Linda Pastan, music by David Liptak (1993); Singin' Sepia, music by Tania Leon (produced New York, 1996); Umoja, music by Alvin Singleton (produced Atlanta, Georgia, 1996); Grace Notes, music by Bruce Adolphe (produced New York, 1997); The Pleasure's in Walking Through, music by Walter Ross (produced Charlottesville, Virginia, 1998); Seven for Luck, music by John Williams (produced Tanglewood, Massachusetts, 1998).
Short Stories
Fifth Sunday. Lexington, University of Kentucky, 1985.
Novel
Through the Ivory Gate. New York, Pantheon Books, 1992.
*Critical Studies: "A Conversation with Rita Dove" by Stan Rubin and Earl Ingersoll, in Black American Literature Forum (Terre Haute, Indiana), 20(6), fall 1986; "The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove," in Callaloo (Charlottesville, Virginia), 9(1), 1986, and "The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove," in Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, edited by James McCorkle, Detroit, Michigan, Wayne State University Press, 1990, both by Robert McDougall; "The Poems of Rita Dove" by Arnold Rampersand, in Callaloo(Charlottesville, Virginia), 9(1), 1986; "Rita Dove: Crossing Boundaries" by Ekaterini Georgoudaki, in Callaloo (Baltimore, Maryland), 14(2), spring 1991; "Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa" by Kirkland C. Jones, in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1992; Coming to Consciousness: Lyric Poetry As Social Discourse in the Work of Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Tony Harrison, and Rita Dove (dissertation) by Jonathan Hufstader, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, 1993; "Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove" by Patricia Wallace, in MELUS (Amherst, Massachusetts), 18(3), fall 1993; Creative Composing: The Verbal Art of Rita Dove, the Visual Art of Stephen Davis and the Filmic Art of Stanley Brakhage (dissertation) by Susan Shibe Davis, Arizona State University, 1994; "The African American Kunstlerroman" by Madelyn Jablon, in Diversity, 2, 1994; "Rita Dove: Identity Markers" by Helen Vendler, in Callaloo (Baltimore, Maryland), 17(2), summer 1994; "No Vers Is Libre" by Scott Ward, in Shenandoah (Lexington, Virginia), 45(3), fall 1995; "Portraits of a Diasporan People: The Poetry of Shirley Campbell and Rita Dove" by Janet Jones Hampton, in Afro-Hispanic Review (Columbia, Missouri), 14(1), spring 1995; "Rita Dove: Taking the Heat" by Brenda Shaughnessy, in Publishers Weekly, 246(15), 12 April 1999; "Sitting the Poet: Rita Dove's Refiguring of Traditions" by Susan R. Van Dyne, in Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1999; "Rita Dove's Shakespeares" by Peter Erickson, in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance, edited by Marianne Novy, New York, St Martin's Press, 1999.
* * *Rita Dove's poetry is concerned with history. Skimming the titles of her poems reveals such figures as Catherine of Alexandria, Nestor, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, and Schumann, as well as Dove's grandparents, Thomas and Beulah. Yet historical fact—and, at times, mythological model—plays a smaller role in Dove's poetry than does lyrical truth. She seeks the untold moments of life that, once discovered, reveal and illuminate more than a historical narrative could. In "Robert Schumann, Or: Musical Genius Begins with Affliction," the moment is a tormented encounter with a prostitute during which the music in the composer's head becomes an alarm and "pulls higher and higher, and still / each phrase returns to A / no chord is safe from A." In "Boccaccio: The Plague Years" the moment that reveals Boccaccio's passion for Fiammetta originates in the collection of corpses:
… He closed his eyes
to hear the slap
of flesh onto flesh, a
liquid crack like a grape
as it breaks on the tongue.
Because of its grisly contrast, this image embodies the need to live fully in the senses, to love most passionately when surrounded by death.
Dove's poetry also explores the history of the African-American experience. The poems in the third section of The Yellow House on the Corner are written from the point of view of American slaves. The Pulitzer prizewinning Thomas and Beulah recounts the story of Dove's grandparents from courtship to death. Just as "these poems tell two sides of a story," the selection from the Dove family history tells a second story of the American experience: Thomas "heading North, straw hat / cocked on the back of his head" ("Jiving"), and Beulah waiting in Akron, Ohio, "Papa's girl, / black though she was" ("Taking in Wash"). Their lives become a part of our collective history. In Grace Notes Dove discovers a metaphor for the African-American experience in the buckeye, "its fruit / so useless, so ugly":
We piled them up
for ammunition.
We lay down
with them
among the bruised leaves
so that we could
rise, shining.
In "Crab-boil" the speaker remembers being on a whites-only beach, but she refuses to be like the crabs scratching uselessly in the bucket:
I decide to believe this: I'm hungry.
Dismantled, they're merely exotic,
a blushing meat … If
we're kicked out now, I'm ready.
The discovery of the buckeye or the crabs is more than the means of articulating the speaker's experience; it becomes the experience itself. The poems reenact discovery.
Just as Dove's poetry explores history through the individual, it also explores time through the moment. Within the moment lies possibility. In "The Fish in the Stone," for example, the fossil is no longer trapped in stone but is permitted for a moment to come alive:
In the ocean the silence
moves and moves
and so much is unnecessary!
Patient, he drifts
until the moment comes
to cast his
skeletal blossom.
For the fish, analysis discovers "the small predictable truths"; the real mystery of life is found only by living. In "Canary" Dove writes, "If you can't be free, be a mystery," because mystery, an essential quality of human life, is liberating. Dove's poems enter the mysterious by opening themselves to the moment of discovery. The discovery usually is not rational but rather emotional or physical. In "Pastoral" the speaker describes breast-feeding, her daughter "like an otter, but warm, / … eyes / unfocused and large: milk-drunk." She discovers
what a young man must feel
with his first love asleep on his breast:
desire, and the freedom to imagine it.
What allows the poetry "desire, and the freedom to imagine it" is Dove's ability to sublimate her own will to the will of the poem, to surrender historical fact to greater truth. In doing so, Dove gives up the security of what she knows through logic to the greater assurance of what she discovers through prosody and the integrity of the line. The poem "Silos," for example, is not satisfied with silos in their prosaic function as warehouses for grain; they become "martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky's / shabby blue." In the end they become "the ribs of the modern world." In "Ars Poetica" Dove writes,
What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.
As the hawk's eyes detect movement even in a ghost town, so Dove's poems, though sharply focused in the subjective moment, see our history far and wide. In On the Bus with Rosa Parks the former U.S. Poet Laureate (1993–95) scrutinizes the way individual lives figure in the tide of history. The blessing of freedom is considered in "Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967" as the poem implores, "tell me what you've read that keeps / that half smile afloat / above the collar of your impeccable blouse."
Drawing links between a mythical past and a tough and unforgiving present is a timeless concern for Dove. Perhaps all major poets who address the concern of equations—between two people, between human and earth, between past and present—find themselves expressing their thoughts in the form of the sonnet. In the introduction to Mother Love, Dove cites Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus as her model. A daughter as well as the mother of a daughter, Dove draws on the timeless tragedy of Demeter and Persephone to demonstrate the range of dynamics between mothers and daughters. She notes that the tightly constrained sonnet form helps her narrators address their dilemmas because mothers and daughters are "struggling to sing in their chains." In a contemporary and ironic way the sonnets depict hell as faux-cultured Parisian society or as an Italian grotto. The narrator confronts a "gatekeeper" by imploring, "hasn't he seen an American Black / before? We find a common language: German." Dramatic and inventive, the poems also resound from small town America and the expanses of Mexico. As in all of her work, Dove sees the power of ancient sorrows and old truths in the pulse of our contemporary and in the momentary.
—Julie Miller and
Martha Sutro