On August 4, 2023, The New York Times published Dwight Garner's brilliant interactive "close read" interpretation of Rita Dove's poem "American Smooth".
It's the third time that the NYT included poetry in its "Closer Look at Art" series, after Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" in 2021 and W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" in 2022.
The New York Times's T Magazine recently released their "Legends and Heirs" series, pairings of women in different stages of their careers, each who inspired the other. Here is the profile of Rita Dove and Safiya Sinclair: Two Poets Who Debated Every Syllable
Kevin Young, poet and current director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, interviewed Rita Dove for The Paris Review's Spring 2023 issue (out now). Below is an excerpt; visit this link to get full access!
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 January 2023 Rita Dove joined the governing board of the venerable American Academy of Arts and Letters for a three year term. On April 11 she attended her first in-person board meeting at the Academy's headquarters in New York City. Previously she had taken on major responsibilities in national organizations when she sat on the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs from 1985 to 1988 (serving as AWP's president in 1986/87), was a senator of Phi Beta Kappa from 1994 to 2000 and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012.
A good "poem sampler" dedicated to Rita Dove's work, interspersed with intriguing notes and interpretations, was just published by the Poetry Foundation. Visit this link for the full post!
The April 2023 issue of ADROIT JOURNAL carries, under the title "Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry", Lisa Russ Spaar's enlightened review of Rita Dove's 1983 collection Museum. Worth reading -- visit this link for more!
Lifetime Learning is honored to highlight three poems from Rita Dove. "Vacation" is the March offering; visit this link for access to the poem!
Lifetime Learning is honored to highlight three poems from Rita Dove. "Chocolate" is their February offering; please visit this link to access the poem!
