"In 1974, I was pretty fearless on the page.”
Pulitzer Prize winner and former US poet laureate Rita Dove’s poetry has always been bold, tackling everything from civil rights history to the sex-filled confusion of adolescence. Some editors would have said those stories wouldn’t sell, Dove said, “But luckily poetry doesn’t sell, so...” Then she laughed, looking out into the audience that clutched gorgeous hardcover copies of her newest, Collected Poems, 1974–2004 in their arms.
Rita Dove was one of the most exciting of the speakers I saw at Printer’s Row Literary Festival on June 10. Dove spoke in a quiet, melodic voice about her childhood, from the way her parents didn’t limit her reading, to a recitation of her first ever poem, titled “The Rabbit with a Droopy Ear.” She didn’t become a writer really until later—she wrote her first good poem, a simmering, angry tale that she didn’t quite grasp herself until later, in college. “On the ground level, we’re all writers,” said Dove, looking out towards the audience, “but a poet has a way of looking at the world and making it shimmer somehow.”
In 1974, Dove went to Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, and it changed her life in more ways than one—she met her husband there, and it changed her conceptions of her home country. “I understood why James Baldwin stayed in Paris,” Dove said, with a shake of her head. While in Germany, she was able to exist without the visual racial baggage that weighed on her in America—even when others were curious, it was a feeling untinged by fear or disgust. She attributes part of the movement currently sweeping the United States to our failure to deal with the guilt that pervades our culture. “We’re never really talked about it—the ways that slavery built and undermined the values of our country,” Dove said. Black Lives Matter is not news, but rather “an awakening of a great portion of the American population to how deep-seated fear and hate can be.”
Dove has always been shy, which is part of what made her visit to Germany so difficult, but she hasn’t let it get in the way of being a figurehead. “If this helps anybody else, if they can see a black woman can be a writer and a poet,” said Dove, “I can get over the shyness and get out there.”
