Rita Dove

Rita Dove (born August 28, 1952, Akron, Ohio, U.S.) is an American poet and writer who was the first African American to serve as poet laureate of the United States (1993–95). A trained cellist, Dove often incorporates music themes into her poems, which are noted for their lyricism. Other themes in her work include family life, history, politics, and race. Her poetry has revisited historical events and the lives of famous figures and imagined the everyday experiences of unsung Americans. In an interview with National Public Radio in 2012, Dove discussed the task of choosing subject matter for writing: “Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they’re the things that sustain us. And they’re the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.”

Family background

Dove has often discussed the struggles of her chemist father, Ray Dove, to be accepted into his life’s profession. While earning a master’s degree in chemistry, he worked as an elevator operator at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. Barred from a white-collar job at the company because of his race, he saw white university students whom he had tutored being hired as chemists at Goodyear before him. It was only after his former school principal and college professor recommended him that he was hired as a chemist, breaking the company’s color barrier. Rita Dove’s mother, Elvira Dove (née Hord), was the daughter of a custodian and a hatmaker, and as a child she had been part of a traveling singing group with her parents and siblings. Many of these experiences became topics of Rita Dove’s poetry.

Early life, education, and teaching career

Dove enjoyed reading while growing up and credits several of her high-school teachers with sparking her interest in poetry. In particular, one teacher took her to her first poetry reading, by John Ciardi, which she has said “planted a kernel in my brain.” Dove was ranked one of the top 100 high-school students in the country in 1970, and she was named a Presidential Scholar. She graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Ohio in 1973, where she studied composition with Milton White and poetry with James Reiss. In an interview with Kevin Young published in The Paris Review in 2023, Dove said of this experience, “Poetry brought together everything I loved—language, music, my dream journals. I even enjoyed revising—the work that needs doing after that first glorious gush, which is when you find out what the gush is really all about.”

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Poetry: First Lines

She studied subsequently at the University of Tübingen in Germany and at the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1977), where her creative writing professors included Stanley Plumly, who first encouraged her to write about race. At Iowa, Dove was the only Black student in her classes. Her fellow students included Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo, and it was there that she met Fred Viebahn, a German writer whom she married in 1979. Dove published the first of several chapbooks of her poetry in 1977. From 1981 to 1989 she taught at Arizona State University, leaving that post to teach at the University of Virginia.

Poetry

In her poetry collections, including The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) and Museum (1983), as well as a volume of short stories titled Fifth Sunday (1985), Dove focused her attention on the particulars of family life and personal struggle, addressing the larger social and political dimensions of the Black experience primarily by indirection. In an interview with The Georgia Review in 2016, Dove talked about the political nature of her early work:

I just wanted to make mainstream America realize that a Black person has the same emotional responses to the entire spectrum of human experience, and not only race—I wanted to write a poem about geometry without the reader being surprised that a Black person had written it. It was important for my aesthetic to write from an inclusive human consciousness.

“Parsley,” one of Dove’s most overtly political poems, appears in Museum and chillingly recounts Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s massacre of thousands of Haitian migrants in 1937. The poem’s name stems from a story claiming that Trujillo determined a person’s origin, Dominican or Haitian—thus, whether they would be killed—based on their pronunciation of the word perejil (“parsley”).

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El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out of the swamp.

In 1986 Dove published the Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah, a cycle of poems chronicling the lives of her maternal grandparents, who were born in the Deep South at the turn of the century. Stylistically, Dove set a challenge to avoid using the pronoun “I” while writing the book. Thematically, she has described it as a “quiet meditation about ‘ordinary’ people who were Black.” “Dusting” and “Pomade,” for example, track Beulah’s memories of her first kiss and of gathering flowers to make a pomade; as Beulah reminisces, she is performing household tasks.

Subsequent poetry collections included The Other Side of the House (1988), Grace Notes (1989), and Mother Love (1995), the last of which is a book of sonnets. On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999) is a sequence of poems inspired by Parks and the American civil rights movement; it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. American Smooth (2004) was written after Dove’s home had been struck by lightning, resulting in a fire that destroyed some of her work in progress. As a consolation, Dove and her husband took classes in ballroom dancing. Among the book’s pieces is “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove,” about the pioneering yet frequently typecast actress who was the first African American to win an Academy Award, for her performance as a maid in Gone with the Wind (1939). The poem ruefully describes Hollywood as a place “where the maid can wear mink and still be a maid.”

In 2009 Dove published another poetic sequence, Sonata Mulattica, which uncovers the life of George Bridgetower, an 18th-century mixed-race violinist to whom Ludwig van Beethoven dedicated his Kreutzer Sonata but who died in obscurity. Her other works include Collected Poems: 1974–2004 (2016) and Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021).

Other works

In addition to poetry and short stories, Dove wrote a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); a collection of essays, The Poet’s World (1995); and a verse play, The Darker Face of the Earth (published 1994). She has collaborated with other musicians to set her poetry to music. Notably, her poem cycle Seven for Luck was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with music by John Williams, in 1998, and Thomas and Beulah was staged as an opera at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2002. Dove has also edited anthologies of American poetry and was a poetry columnist for The Washington Post’s book section (2000–03) and poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine (2018–19).

Honors

In 1993 Dove was appointed poet laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress, becoming the youngest person and the first African American to hold the post. She served two one-year terms. With Louise Glück and W.S. Merwin, she was a special consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress’ bicentennial in 1999–2000. She was awarded the 1996 National Humanities Medal by Pres. Bill Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts by Pres. Barack Obama.