97. Rita Dove, poet

I know the name Rita Dove, but I don't know her work. But as FB does so well (or so annoyingly, depending on the subject), yesterday for some reason it served Rita Dove up in my stream. It was a photo from 1977 of her and her then-thirty-year-old husband Fred, on Padre Island, Texas, posted on the occasion of Fred's 79th birthday. And because I looked more closely at that entry, Rita showed up again later in my feed, with a reference to a NYT essay by Roger Rosenblatt, a "love letter to old ladies." 

Now, Rita Dove is only 73, which I don't think qualifies just yet as an "old lady." But I'm glad he included her, because that essay caused me to seek her out. Here's what he says about her:

My friend the sublime poet Rita Dove wrote lyrical poems as a young woman. They were innocent explorations of wonder. In her later poems she has become a sassy, punning old lady in the know. A recent book, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” shows her in control of all she sees. I did a reading with her a couple of years ago. I was floored by her quiet self-assurance — like an orchestra conductor, in command of all the instruments in the world.

Rita Dove was the first African American Poet Laureate of the United States (1993–95) and won the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection, Thomas and Beulah (1986). She is now vice president for literature at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she has taught since 1989. Her honors and activities go on and on; you can read more about her here.

So here are just a few of her poems, including a prose poem. I am already looking forward to reading more. The first one is from Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021).

Prose in a Small Space

It’s supposed to be prose if it runs on and on, isn’t it?  All those words, too many to fall into rank and file, stumbling bareassed drunk onto the field reporting for duty, yessir, spilling out as shamelessly as the glut from a megabillion dollar chemical facility, just the amount of glittering effluvium it takes to transport a little girl across a room, beige carpet thick under her oxfords, curtains blowzy with spring — is that the scent of daffodils drifting in?

Daffodils don’t smell but prose doesn’t care.  Prose likes to hear itself talk; prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canapés, lust rampant in the antipasta — e.g., a silver fork fingered sadly as the heroine crumples a linen napkin in her lap to keep from crying out at the sight of Lord Campion’s regal brow inclined tenderly toward the wealthy young widow . . . prose applauds such syntactical dalliances.

Then is it poetry if it’s confined?  Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention — Over here! It’s me! — while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs?  We have white space too; is this music?  As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?

The next one is from the October 20, 2025, New Yorker, and it gets at what Rosenblatt called her sassiness. You can hear Rita read it here.

For the Birds 

Cardinal Rule No. 1: Duck
if necessary. Don’t be
the canary in the coal mine
unless you like playing cards
with the devil and his stool pigeons.
Usually, the unassuming won’t show up
onscreen; no one remembers enough
to describe the ordinary wren
nesting in the elm outside their window
after the eagle swoops down
for a snack. So much for blending in:
Who’s the turkey now?

Here are a couple from 1989:

Canary

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

The Breathing and the Endless News

Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts: elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle

for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles. . . . 

Children know this; they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly

with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped-over toddler clothes:

no blossoming there. So we 
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do—

line them up and shoot them.
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.

Finally, here's one from 1987, because I'm a sucker for ars poeticas:

Ars Poetica

Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant
was nothing, a blink
in the long dull stare of Wyoming.
Halfway there the unknown but terribly
important essayist yelled Stop!
I wanna be in this;
and walked fifteen yards into the land
before sky bore down and he came running,
crying Jesus—there's nothing out there!

I once met an Australian novelist
who told me he never learned to cook
because it robbed creative energy.
What he wanted most was
to be mute; he stacked up pages;
he entered each day with an ax.

What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

I could go on and on, but this gives a taste. You can find more of her poems at the Poetry Foundation, and I'll end with a documentary film made in 2014 by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. I haven't watched it yet, but I will.