Rita Dove: Rara Avis

by Charles McGuigan 07.2022

Rita Dove is hurtling through Iowa, Des Moines-bound, her husband, Fred Viebahn, at the wheel, on this road trip across America that started in Charlottesville and will end outside Phoenix where the couple will visit their daughter and granddaughter. Just the day before, Rita was awarded a PhD from the University of Iowa, home of one of the most famous writers’ schools in the world where Rita received her MFA back in the late seventies. But this is just another feather in a headdress already liberally spiked with other plumage. Rita has received honorary doctorates from Tuskeegee University, Case Western Reserve University, The University of Akron, Dartmouth College, Spelman College, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Washington & Lee University, Howard University, the Pratt Institute, Duke University, and many others.  She has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Medal of Arts, and scores of other awards along the way. She has also served as United States Poet Laureate and Poet Laureate of Virginia, and holds the chair of the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.    

Twenty-four hours ago, almost to the minute, a white supremacist, dressed in tactical gear and body armor, and wielding an assault weapon, massacred ten people at Tops Friendly Market, a community grocery store in a largely Black neighborhood in east Buffalo, New York. This domestic terrorist, like so many others who have targeted minority communities in the recent past, used an AR-15-style rifle to commit the atrocities. It was a racially motivated crime, cruel and barbaric, spurred by the ludicrous notion of “replacement theory”. 

When I mention this grisly act to Rita, I can sense her nodding and her shoulders tensing up. We had been talking about her eleventh and most recent book of poetry “Playlist for the Apocalypse”, which includes the cycle of poems titled “A Standing Witness”, where Lady Liberty speaks from her pedestal in New York Harbor. There are several lines in “Beside the Golden Door” that strike me with the force of a hardwood mallet, and resonates long after like a tubular bell pounded deep into my skull. They go like this: 

“Believers slaughter their doubters

while the greedy oil their lips with excuses

and the righteous turn merciless; the merciful, mad.”

And I can’t help thinking of the words crafted a little over a century ago by William Butler Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming”, in which he was writing about another sort of apocalypse that he saw unfolding:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

When I ask how she views the past several years under the former president, Rita says this: “The entire debacle is continuing. The havoc that he created is still playing out now. I felt there was unfinished business that this country had. We keep patching things up. We had the Civil Rights movement in the sixties, and then the many assassinations that happened between 1963 and 1968. We felt the world was ending, or that this democracy was ending.”

After successfully navigating a course over those troubled waters, it seemed progress was at long last in sight on the horizon. “And yet when these things began to happen with Black Lives Matter, with countless shootings going on, and with Trump, I thought to myself, ‘I didn’t think I’d live to see this,’” says Rita. “I knew something like this would probably be coming, but I didn’t think it was going to happen that fast. We had not really, as a nation, talked about racism, and how we can atone for that. We really haven’t ever talked about that, so it’s going to keep popping up until we figure out how to deal with it.”

Rita’s poetry is as sparse and meaning-laden as the work of Rainer Maria Rilke. She has the rare ability to give personal life to historic realities, and possesses an inquisitive eye trained on the smallest of details which gather meaning as a poem progresses. This, too: Her poems cut to the quick without wagging a moral finger at the reader.

“How do you achieve that?” I ask her. 

“It comes out of a belief that we all have weaknesses, and there but for the grace of whatever, what parents we had, what history we had, there go I,” she says. “And you can’t gain anything in terms of persuading another human being if you’re shouting at them. But what you can do is sidle up to them. You can whisper, make them lean in to listen, and if they lean in to listen, then perhaps you can persuade them to be open to the realization that other people are human beings. That they are just like them, that they have the same emotions, that they have the same problems. And these are the small problems. We’re not even talking about the large problems. We’re talking about whether you can get your shoe fixed in town. On those things, we connect, and then it’s a little harder to kill that person.”

Rita grew up reading Shakespeare, and understood that whether it was a Danish prince, a Celtic king, or a pair of young Italian lovers, they all shared the same humanity. “I knew the heart of Shakespeare’s characters,” Rita tells me. “I felt like I knew them as human beings. And then, as I began to write, I thought if I, as a Black girl, could feel this connection, everyone else can feel the connections between any character, or my own voice. That’s what woke me to write what I do.”

Rita wrote her first short story—a sci-fi yarn—when she was just ten years old. At the time she would devour the science fiction periodicals her older brother read—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and so on. She read the stories of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. “That’s when I started,” she says. “That’s when I began.” 

In her senior year of high school she had an English teacher who taught her charges how to recognize exceptional writing. “She would go through a sentence of Thomas Hardy and show us why that sentence worked on multiple levels,” Rita remembers. “That was fantastic. It was wonderful. She took a few of us one Saturday to a book signing by John Ciardi just because she thought we were so interested in literature that we might want to meet a writer. So that was the first living writer that I met. That was in Akron when I was sixteen or seventeen.”

A couple years later, at Miami University of Ohio, Rita had a poetry teacher, a published poet himself, who passed on his own passion to his students. “His enthusiasm was incredible,” says Rita. “He showed us that a poem was not just an outpouring of your feelings, but a crafting of feelings so that others could feel it as well.”

In graduate school, things began to gel. In the library one day, Rita selected a random book from a shelf. It was cloth bound, with no dust jacket, and written by a young woman named Toni Morrison, who grew up in a town just an hour away from Rita’s hometown of Akron. 

“When I started reading ‘The Bluest Eye’, I thought, this is taking place in my backyard,” Rita recalls. “The pacing and the language were working. I think that she showed me that it was all right to talk about different degrees of blackness in terms of class, in terms of location. Up till that point, the only things that I had been reading were usually stories about Harlem or the South.”

A poem for Rita often erupts from the smallest of kernels—a snippet of conversation overheard, a road sign caught in the corner of her eye. “It’s usually something very specific, a detail, something that lodges itself into my mind,” she says. “But what’s driving it, of course, is the reason why that detail catches my attention. There is a theme, or there is some kind of emotion that is not yet articulated that is driving to find its outlet and it’s going to ping on that particular detail. A lot of times I keep a notebook and I keep notes on my phone and I just put down all sorts of random things.”

As trees in a forest communicate with one another, so too do the poems that Rita writes. 

“I tend to work in fragments, and I tend to be working on several poems at once,” she says. “I let them sit by themselves, do whatever they want to do until I feel one poem speaking to another, and then they form their own little groups, they form their own little sub-tribes, and at some point it feels like a book. I’m always in the middle of a notebook of poems, and I can’t predict when it’s going to coalesce and become a book.”

“I’m writing poems constantly,” says Rita Dove 

Rita Dove will be reading from “Playlist for the Apocalypse” at 6 pm July 28 in Lecture Hall at the Library of Virginia, 800 East Broad Street, Richmond, VA 23219. For more information, please contact Dawn Greggs at (804)692-3813. 

Photo by Fred Viebahn