Legend holds that Billie Holiday once said, “If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.” That notion seems to have been adopted by Rita Dove, the author of four collections of verse and two fiction books who was appointed America’s poet laureate in May.
“There’s an original, elusive quality about her work which I find enchanting, and yet there is a toughness in it that I find reassuring,” said poet Angela Jackson. “Her poems don’t come at you head on, they come at you indirectly, sideways, they suggest rather than tell. I had come to think of African-American literature as being frontal, like Nigerian sculpture, but that is not always so.”
When she succeeds Mona Van Duyn in October, Dove, 40, will become the nation’s youngest-ever poet laureate as well as the first black to serve in the position (though Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks had the job in 1985, the year before the title was changed from consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress).
Dove predicates her uniqueness upon an ordinariness, almost as if she were trying to get back to something. Her poetry finds the glint in things pedestrian.
“Poetry is the essence of writing; it’s language concentrated to its greatest intensity, like bullion cubes, saying more with musicality, and with less,” she said in a Chicago interview days before her appointment by the Library of Congress to the one-year term.
Dove’s indirectness and lack of political sloganeering place her as an heir to Brooks, completely bypassing the nationalism of the 1960s.
“I missed the orthodoxy of the black arts movement because I came into my own later,” she said. She refuses to be limited by any particular paradigm or program. “Laser beams are more effective politically than the broad radiance, that broad spectrum, which we as artists like,” she said.
“Poetry, for me, is not social agency nor is it detached from our wide, wondrous world. True, I have a quiet, controlled voice that I would even call a watchful repose. I find it a very fruitful way to persuade people. Often, you can say more by being quiet, even silent, than by assaulting the reader,” she said, smiling.
But occasionally, Dove is fairly direct in her writings, particularly in her first collection of poetry, “The Yellow House on the Corner” (Carnegie-Mellon, 1980). In the poem “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream,” she voices phantasmagoric rage:
“Seven years ago . . .” he begins; but
I cut him off: “Those years are gone-
What is there now?” He starts to cry; his eyeballs
Burst into flame. I can see caviar
Imbedded like buckshot between his teeth.
His hair falls out in clumps of burned-out wire.
The music grows like branches in the wind.
I lie down, chuckling as the grass curls around me.
He can only stand, fists clenched, and weep
Tears of iodine, while singers float away,
Rustling on brown paper wings.”
Dove, whose measured lines flow in precious drops that can chip away at any hard surface, employs meters and signature voices not easily limited by sex, style, theme or even history. She combines a clinical dispassion-a patient, fluid methodology and syncretic imagination-with intimate knowledge akin to spiritual insight. Her skill lies in an ability to make regular words and images fresh, as in this animation of the landscape from “The Hill Has Something to Say” (whose title serves as the opening line):
. . . but isn’t talking.
Instead the valley groans as the wind,
amphoric,
hoots its one bad note.
Halfway up, we stop to peek
through smudged pine: this is Europe
and its green terraces. . . .
it’s not all in the books
(but maps don’t lie).
The hill has a right
to stand here, one knob
in the coiled spine of a peasant
who, forgetting to flee, simply
lay down forever.”
Dove, whose third poetry collection, “Thomas and Beulah,” a series about the lives of her grandparents, garnered a 1987 Pulitzer Prize, lists T.S. Eliot, Robert Hayden and Robert Frost among her early literary influences. “I imitated those writers-Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, too-whose poetry literally danced off the page.”
Dove’s first attempts to write, “around (age) 11 or 12,” were not as a poet but as a journalist for the local newspapers in Akron, Ohio, where she was born. “I didn’t even know that you could be such a thing as a writer,” she said earnestly. “I couldn’t imagine that that was something I wanted to do as a career-there were no writers in my family.”
Through poetry, Dove reaches back to her childhood. “Crab-Boil,” from her 1989 collection “Grace Notes” (W.W. Norton), captures the shattering innocence of a 10-year-old girl, the daughter of a chemical engineer who had became an elevator operator because no one would hire a black engineer. Dove, along with her older brother and two younger sisters, were sheltered from their father’s indignities, and had to learn about them on a Southern visit.
“My most poignant memory-that of feeling quite frightened-is chronicled in `Crab-Boil,’ ” she said. “When I went to visit my aunt in the South, we went to this beach. It was Florida, 1962, and there was no one there but us, yet we were supposed to not go over our side. I couldn’t understand it, but we threw up our feet and ran up and down the sand.”
I don’t believe they won’t come
and chase us back to the colored-only shore
crisp with litter and broken glass.
“When do we kill them?”
“Kill them? Hell, the water does that.
They don’t feel a thing . . . no nervous system.”
Much of Dove’s work centers on the home, the personal. Yet home is not a static, even stable place, but a state of mind (a “state of grace,” in her words) that continually shifts.
“To get to the truth at that moment, any moment, is a slippery affair, yet we find our own truths, wherever we are, whatever we do, and I think that must be our ultimate calling as poets, as artists, as living human beings,” she said.
One would hardly think that Dove did not have some deeply religious source blowing behind her ear. In demeanor and in the tenor of her writings, Dove employs voices that are seasoned, serene and righteous in their certainty.
Claims she’s an atheist
But her spiritual undergirding seems to be a paradox. “I’m an atheist,” she said frankly, “and I think it is important to say that. I don’t burn Bibles or worship some vain thing.
“I used to sit there on the pew and wander-I daydreamed a lot and, I think, imagined my first poems there. Even then, I couldn’t believe the rituals.”
Yet she continues to draw from her upbringing in the church. The title “Grace Notes,” she said, refers “to the essential or general understanding that we have in the large religious sense, but also the small wonders, the little miracles.”
Dove said she got as far away from the church as she could by burying herself in books, “lots of them, at the library, at home. When I immersed myself in James Baldwin’s biblical fervor, and in the works of Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich and Gwendolyn Brooks, it was a way to forget about the world. I studied foreign languages-French, German-and played music all the time. Who has ever heard of a black girl fluent in German?
“When I told my parents that I wanted to be a poet, they looked at me and said, `OK.’ They didn’t know what to make of it, but they had faith in me.”
Dove excelled at school and became used to a particular, exceptional status, even though she would have liked to have had some company. “Being the only black in class, it is a certain weight to carry,” she said. “It restricts you to representing a whole race and yet it frees you to do the same. Of course, humans are sometimes quicker to tag the bad rather than the good on you.”
Teaches creative writing
Intellectual curiosity and hard work culminated in her 1973 graduation summa cum laude from Miami University in Ohio, where she studied English, German and the cello. She studied in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship and, in 1977, earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa.
In summer 1981 Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University. She became a writer-in-residence at Tuskegee Institute the next year, after which she won a successive series of awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1985 Dove’s first collection of short fiction, “Fifth Sunday,” was published. Since 1989 she has been an English professor at the University of Virginia. She will continue to teach there while commuting to Washington each week.
Her official duties as poet laureate include advising the Library of Congress on literary matters, answering mail about poetry and scheduling a series of readings, for which she’ll receive a $35,000 stipend. Dove is also an associate editor of Callaloo, a journal of black culture.
Her colleagues are quick to point out the similarities between Dove and some of America’s foremost writers, including Brooks, the only other black winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1950).
“Like Brooks and Langston Hughes before her, she makes the ordinary extraordinary,” said Angela Jackson, the catalyst behind a mid-May reading at Columbia College pairing Dove with Brooks.
“She focuses on drylongso-everyday black folks, ordinary stuff, people who are fragile and ordinary but through the recognition of lived experience (prove themselves to be) more than that. She highlights them through the sheer intimacy of craft.
“And in her person, she’s that way as well,” Jackson said. “Well-traveled and supremely intelligent, yet down to earth. When we first met, we talked about eating green fried tomatoes.”
Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University and editor of TriQuarterly, an NU literary magazine, hailed Dove’s appointment as “an infusion of new blood, new talent, not the staid, stodgy tired stuff.
“I don’t like to qualify Rita because it may diminish her talent,” he said, “but because she’s black, young and a woman, even though there have been women before, she brings new life to the office.”
Talks of Bessie Smith
Dove draws on a wide range of other inspiration. “My sources are not all literary,” she said, “because music and art and my relatives and my daughter all intersect at points of poetry. Bessie Smith was always playing in my house when I was young, and classical music, too, since I played the cello.”
Dove said she has also been enriched by her travels with her family. “In Germany they stare at us and point-they point at me,” she said of her regular visits with husband Fred Viebahn to his homeland.
“But the funny thing is when Fred and I were in Israel, their fingers were on him because they were not as used to someone so white, so blond.”
They couple have a 10-year-old daughter, Aviva Chantal Tamu Dove-Viebahn.
Viebahn, also a writer, has translated two of Dove’s books, “The Yellow House on the Corner” and “Museum” (Carnegie Mellon, 1983), into the collection “Die glaeserne Stirn der Gegenwart” (“The Glass Star of the Present”).
“German is the perfect metaphor for good poetry,” Dove said, “because everything depends upon the verb, which always comes at the end of the sentence, for active closure.
“It’s like a mini-epiphany, really. I really didn’t understand English until I learned another language-German-which has it all down to the last word.”
