Earlier today, Playlist for the Apocalypse was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work -- Poetry! Click here for the full list.
Recent and Latest News
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University of Virginia President Jim Ryan welcomed Rita Dove this week as the tenth guest on his “Inside UVA” podcast. Click here to read more about it and to listen to the episode!
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On Playlist for the Apocalypse: Rita Dove’s new collection is about the weight of American history, and it’s also about mortality. It’s the first time she has publicly acknowledged that she has had a form of multiple sclerosis for more than 20 years. Some of these poems address health troubles. Some are about Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama. Garner called the poems “among her best,” and wrote: “Dove’s books derive their force from how she so deftly stirs the everyday — insomnia, TV movies, Stilton cheese, rattling containers of pills — into her world of ideas and intellection, in poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious.”
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This episode of “Literary Arts: The Archive Project,” features highlights from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions between novelist Brandon Taylor and Genevieve Hudson, cartoonist Aminder Dhaliwal and OPB’s Tiffany Camhi, and legendary poet Rita Dove and Mary Szybist.
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Rita Dove with Sam Nester (l) and Renée Fleming (r). Photo © Katie Dance.
The Fulbright Program, celebrating its 75th anniversary throughout 2021, held a spectacular event on November 30 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Alumni, friends, and supporters of the Fulbright Program joined us virtually to celebrate the accomplishments of the past 75 years and to look ahead to the exciting future of the U.S. government’s flagship program of educational and cultural exchange.
The event included personal stories and performances by some of our most extraordinary alumni, including recent participants and those who have had long and distinguished careers. The celebration highlighted the Fulbright Program’s impact in five important areas: the environment; education; public service; science, technology, and public health; and the arts.
Click here for more information on the gala, including photos!
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On a cold October night, Middlebury's Mahaney Arts Center hosted the New England premiere of a new work by Richard Danielpour.
Delayed by over a year due to the pandemic, the work, "A Standing Witness" is the result of a collaboration between Danielpour and Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate, Rita Dove. It was commissioned by Music from Copland House in Peekskill, New York.
The work, a monumental 60-minute long song cycle for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble, connects and interweaves pivotal events from the last 50 years of American history, often highlighting the old adage, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
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Check out these media highlights!
The New York Times Book Review featured Playlist for the Apocalypse in its recent piece, "Five Poets Who Find Music in the Personal, the Political or in Music Itself"
OregonArtsWatch reviewed the Portland Book Festival event featuring Rita Dove, Qian Julie Wang, and Lauren Groff
And Rita Dove's Portland Book Festival conversation with Mary Szybist was excerpted as one of the Festival highlights in the radio show/podcast The Archive Project
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Click here to access the video! (Originally aired November 10, 2021)
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Writes Teow Lim Goh: "Rita Dove’s new poetry collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse, draws from the past and present, from the segregation of Jews in Venice’s Ghetto to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; from her relationship with her mother to her struggles with multiple sclerosis to quiet and private moments in which the speaker’s world shifts, whether suddenly or imperceptibly. These poems, in the range of histories and personalities that they invoke, resemble a playlist, a curated selection of songs from a variety of albums and artists, tracking different voices, moods, and themes. They are less about the end times than the cycles of tragedy and redemption that humans seem wired to repeat."
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M: Your first collection appeared in 1980. Since then, you have produced ground-breaking work across genres. What do you feel has changed most in your poetic practice since you first began writing?
R: Poetic practice can also mean how the writing gets done. When I was a fledgling poet, I wrote to a world that didn’t know I existed, basically calling out: “Here I am! Is anyone there?” And with every response – a stranger writing a letter or attending a reading – I could feel the tribe growing larger, stronger. As I continued publishing, teaching, and giving readings and lectures, my audience grew. Now I’m fortunate to have an readership that appreciates my work, which is wonderful; but when I sit down to the blank page, I can’t assume to know who’s in that audience or anticipate what will move them. A poet addresses the void and hopes someone is listening; the poem is both a shout into the cosmos and a whisper into a stranger’s ear. I’ve been called a public poet, but for me the act of writing is a very intimate – nearly illicit – undertaking; to be aware of all those incognito readers, waiting, while trying to coax a poem into being is to become self-conscious in the worst way – inspiration either flies right out the window or chokes on its own sputters.
Which brings us to changes in my physical poetic practice over the years. When I was young with a myriad possibilities before me, I could write anywhere – in a coffee shop or on a park bench, at a card table with a 12-inch TV blaring from the corner of the room. But the world’s racket seems more dissonant now, and I yearn for quiet. I try to carve out as large a chunk of uninterrupted time as I can finagle and retreat into a near-monastic seclusion, far away from the clamoring voices, until I can finally hear the whispers at my core. Poetic practice becomes a physical escape – shut the door, turn off radio and phone, block the internet – to a desert island of the mind where the cacophony of opinions and expectations has fallen away.
I began as many young writers do – reading voraciously, emulating favorite poets, searching for my “voice” – as if voice were a static quality. Everything I’ve experienced and lived through has somehow affected my writing, even my passionate pursuit of decidedly non-poetic hobbies like ballroom dancing and sewing: I pay more attention to syllabic dips and swirls; I relish stitching the parts of a narrative into a three-dimensional garment that can pirouette in the center of a lyric moment. Collaborating across genres – with composers, visual artists, architects, dancers – has enriched my poetic intonation and pacing. But I would say that being a practicing musician has been the greatest game changer. I started playing cello in fourth grade, around the same time I began writing poems and science fiction stories. And it’s fair to say that the poems in my earlier books were written by a cellist; I liked working those lower registers. But when my professional life began to speed up and my schedule grew too busy to accommodate dragging a cello along on book tours, I took up classical singing, reasoning that at least now I could carry the music with me, inside me. I discovered that I was a soprano, which meant if I wanted to make music, I had to lead the choir; so I learned to relax in that thin upper air and float without looking down. Over time, some of that chutzpah has rubbed off on my poetry. Quite a few poems in my latest book could have been sung by a dramatic soprano; there’s a conscious vocal projection, conveying the melodic line.
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Click here to read the poem! (Originally featured October 27, 2021)
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The US Poet Laureate from ’93 to ’95, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts—readers, it’s been too long since Rita Dove has blessed us with her writing. She speaks about relearning how to write after her multiple sclerosis diagnosis. And her experiences with racism as a Black woman wherever she goes. She says “Playlist for the Apocalypse” echoes what’s going on in the world, from many different historical and personal directions, while meaning to comfort the reader.
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In Dove’s commanding first collection of new poems since her 2017 NAACP Image Award–winning Collected Poems: 1974–2004, she offers an unforgettable exploration of contemporary crises while still finding beauty and cause for hope. Her ruminations on illness, climate change, and political upheaval deliver sharp perspectives on life’s difficulties and wrongs big and small, while encouraging readers to see current possibilities for effecting future change.
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Click to read and/or listen to the poem! (Originally featured October 18, 2021)
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An unmanned NASA spacecraft named Lucy is making the first space mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, small bodies that share an orbit with the fifth planet from the sun. Lucy’s payload includes a plaque imprinted with words of wisdom for future explorers to find – including poetry from University of Virginia professor Rita Dove.
The spacecraft – more than 52 feet tip to tip, with its two circular solar arrays unfurled, each close to 24 feet in diameter – is scheduled to launch between Saturday and Nov. 7. It will embark on a 12-year journey to study some of the asteroids in “the swarms of Trojan asteroids associated with [but not actually near] Jupiter,” according to NASA’s Lucy website. “These primitive bodies hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system.”
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In this episode, Jordan Kisner talks to Rita Dove, author most recently of Playlist for the Apocalypse, about discovery, taking a break from creating and publishing, and re-learning to hold a pencil again after her MS diagnosis.
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Pierre Jalbert: Crossings
John Harbison: Songs America Loves to Sing
Richard Danielpour: A Standing WitnessOctober 8, 2021 | 7:30PMMandel Hall
Music From Copland House’s adventurous and exhilarating concerts link America’s composers to their musical and cultural ancestry and to the wider worlds of literature, theater, painting, history, nature, and science. At UChicago Presents, the acclaimed resident ensemble from Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home and mezzo-soprano Susan Graham explore what it is to be American with the world premiere of A Standing Witness by Richard Danielpour on poetry by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove.
For more information, including to purchase tickets, visit this link.
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In her first book of new poems in twelve years, acclaimed poet Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Deftly connecting history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives—a trademark of the writer the Boston Globe has called “perhaps the best public poet we have”—and alternating poignant meditations on mortality with acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.
This event originally took place August 3, 2021; it can be watched on the Rain Taxi Review of Books YouTube page.
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(image credit: Rebecca Clarke)
- Click below to read them now!
- "By the Book," The New York Times (August 6, 2021)
- Interview with Chet'la Sebree, Guernica (August 11, 2021)
- Interview with Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch (August 15, 2021)
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...and the reviews are in!
From Meredith Boe of Chicago Review of Books: "[Dove's] poems magnify the marginalized individual, simultaneously illuminating national and global failed attempts at democracy. As always, her words are raw, poignant, and accessible."
From Dwight Garner of The New York Times: "'Playlist for the Apocalypse,' Rita Dove’s new book of poems, is among her best. [...] You sense the books of many poets of Dove’s generation slipping to the back of the bookcase. Not hers."
From Publishers Weekly: "Dove brilliantly breathes new life into the present age, revealing it as a time for urgent change."
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A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe).
In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives—the simmering resentment of an elevator operator, an octogenarian’s exuberant mambo, the mordant humor of a philosophizing cricket.
Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.
For more information, including pre-ordering Playlist for the Apocalypse, visit W. W. Norton's website.
