Rita Dove will be appearing as guest of the International Poetry Forum on April 18th at 2PM in the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall.
Rita Dove is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Her work spans across an essay collection, a drama, a novel, a collection of short stories, and 11 collections of poetry, including her Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986) and her most recent collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse (W.W. Norton 2021). She is the only poet to have been awarded both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. I spoke with Dove by phone ahead of her visit to Pittsburgh for a reading hosted by the International Poetry Forum. As a graduate student, I pored over Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry and continue to use it in my teaching life now—I was starstruck to be on the phone with one of the most celebrated poets in the country. We discussed her first steps into poetry, her recent work, what new and seasoned poets can offer each other, what poetry can teach us about the mind and body, and how “when a poem really, really touches you, time falls away.”
Cameron Barnett
I thought just to begin, I’d love to start at the beginning: could you recall for me some of your earliest moments when you felt drawn to poetry as a craft or as a calling for you?
Rita Dove
That’s fascinating because I was drawn to poetry at an early age. I was about 10 or 11 and you know, this seemed to be so cool that you could express such deep emotions and stories with so few words. It seemed to strike a different chord than all of the novels and short stories and things that I had read and devoured. So, that was my first attraction to poetry. Now, as a craft, it’s a slightly different question, because there are steps to that. I do remember being thrilled when I was about 11; I was invited by our teacher—the teacher had said, please do something creative as a project to respond to spring, and to Easter—and I decided to write a poem. Of course, I decided to write a poem that was rhymed, and that poem featured a rabbit who had an ear that drooped down and he was very upset because he wasn’t perfect. And so I didn’t know how I was going to end it; I just leapt into it and for some reason that character popped to mind. And it was the rhyme—it was the rhyme and the quatrains, the whole ballad, that led me to my ending, and I remember being thrilled by the fact that even though I didn’t know the ending at that point, I could trust language and craft to help me open up my mind. So that was the first very basic kind of notion that there was something beyond the emotion or the narrative that could drive a poem. But it wasn’t until I was really in college when I began to consciously apply the notion of language and craft to writing. Before that I was writing stories mostly, some stream of consciousness, some terrible, you know, teenage stuff. But when I got to the university and took my first creative writing classes, I realized the thrill of being able to hone that language, to make it musical. Up to that point, I had been a musician—I played the cello. I was applying all this notion of craft music, but not the language, and it was at that point that I realized the two were very closely aligned.
CB
Oh, I love that! Speaking about craft, I have a couple questions about your most recent book, Playlist for the Apocalypse.I loved it, and funny enough, one of the poems that really stood out to me was “Ode to my Right Knee.” As a writer and teacher myself, I was really taken by the playfulness of how each line begins with the same letter/sound. But there’s a tension between that playfulness and the subject matter of the piece. I’m thinking of the lines “when walking wrenches” and “corroding, crazed cartilage, calmly chipping.” I was interested in how sound plays the mediator between these elements of the poem. I’m wondering, when you think about your poetry, what sound qualities do you consider or feel drawn to?
RD
I would say that every poem really dictates its own sound qualities. It’s rare that I will go into a poem thinking, “Oh, it’s got to sound like this.” It’s a give and a take between writing the poem and working out what sounds are going to be the best for it. And that can go line by line. I mean, if there’s a line that I want an impact [for] or I want it to punch, then I would consider the sound. And sometimes it’s the sound that dictates the emotion that that line is trying to get across. So that goes poem by poem. There’s a poem, “Soup,” in Playlist for the Apocalypse, which keeps rolling, which keeps stirring and stirring and stirring, and the sound was dictated in a certain way by the subject matter as I began to try to get at how one absorbs news, and all of the things that rush to mind to try to circumvent it, and being aware of my surroundings at the same time—that kind of schmoosh or mélange, to use a word that’s in the poem. So that influences the sound, whereas a poem like “Ode to My Right Knee”—which I really owe to my students—that actually was dictated almost from the beginning by the sound and by the craft.
First of all, I give my students a writing exercise that is very personalized that I call the Wild Card, and it comes at any time during the semester. I say that it’s personalized because there’s a different one for every student, and I try to envision what would push them in a way that they don’t want to go, you know, or something like that. So, [the exercises] are very wild: sometimes they have to walk out to the fields, sometimes they have to tear poems in half, all sorts of things, depending on natural proclivities. One of the classes challenged me and said, “Well, you ought to give yourself one. You need a Wild Card, you know; you keep giving us cards,” and I said, “That’s fair enough,” and I devised this wild card for myself, which was a tricky kind of thing to do. At that point in my writing, I really didn’t want that many rules and that kind of stricture. So that’s why I gave it to myself—the idea that every line would be alliterative in and of itself, that’s what it has to do. But then I realized that that was going to be a very stumbly kind of thing; it works against my natural sense to want to have a rhythm that resolves in a kind of music. Because of that, I didn’t have a subject matter yet. I was trying to envision the problems that this was going to cause me. And it dawned to me that it was a stumbling kind of gait that this exercise was giving me—and as it turns out I was having problems with my right knee, because my husband and I have been doing ballroom dancing. I had developed some arthritis in that knee; I was dealing with braces and all sorts of things. And I thought, “That’s what this poem is about, and that’s the essence of the poem that’s going to match this stumbling gate.” So, again, craft andcontent found each other and helped each other.
CB
That’s wonderful! It brings me to another one of my questions. As a teacher, I’m always interested in the interplay between teacher and student: who knows more about writing, who’s really teaching whom? One of the questions that gets asked a lot is, “How do you know when a poem is finished?” What I often tell people is that a poem is finished when the writer feels satisfied with it, because I like to reframe the question from a matter of completion to a matter of success.What would be your take on the idea of success in a poem? What does success look like for you?
RD
There is a point in the poem for me where it begins to take off on its own, where it has found its rhythm, and also found its purpose, and it’s going faster than I can imagine. That, to me, is exciting, it’s scary, and it feels like I’m on the road to a successful poem. And I do think that the idea of designing the poem as being successful rather than completed is really a good one because when good students say, “Is the poem finished?” I’m like, “This is not the person to ask, and if you have to ask that, then maybe it isn’t finished.”
I always feel [a poem is successful] when I can do no more, when I have met what I can do to that poem at that age that I’m at, at that stage that I’m at. And when I say that, I mean that I can do no more, but I’m also not embarrassed by what I’ve written. You know, it’s not that I’m just going to throw it out there no matter what. So I think, “Okay, this is as far as I can get, and this is good enough. I mean, this is what it can do at this time,” then I feel that I’ve been successful.
CB
I love that. It makes me think about how writing is a journey and thinking about ourselves as always on that journey and just getting to different stages or moments rather than just finally arriving. I’ve heard all kinds of writing advice about how to be a writer. It runs the gamut from, “You have to write every single day,” all the way down to “Just wait for the muse to find you and then write whatever comes.” In your experience, what has felt like the sweet spot between a constant practice or writing when you feel moved.
RD
Yeah, those extremes are exactly that—extremes. I find that it depends on who I am talking to or teaching. For instance, with students who are just beginning to write, I do urge that they try to write consistently, that they do try to write every day, mainly so that they can get into the feeling of writing as something that you do and not wait for inspiration. Because, I’m sorry, if you’re going to wait for inspiration, you know, inspiration is just going to say, “Oh, well, that person isn’t even trying.” There is an element of work—lovely, wonderful work, frustrating work sometimes—but an element of real work to writing. You write, you revise, you fail, you come back, and [you] get a student to realize that their first draft may be just horrible, but it may turn into an amazing poem if they keep at it. Keep working at the language. So that’s the advice I give them, and over the years I have discovered that I can’t write every day. And when I say write every day, I mean, sit down and write for two or three hours. To me, at least that much has to go into a work day. It’s because I travel, it’s because life gets in the way, motherhood had gotten in the way, all sorts of things “get in the way.” I don’t consider them getting in the way, but it’s contributing to the life experience, because when you’re writing, you’re also living, and if you aren’t living, I don’t see how you can have a poem or write something that is even remotely interesting to anyone else.
So, it’s a balance. And I discovered also that there are different ways to write. For me, the sweet spot is to allow myself, my mind, to be open. I keep notebooks, and then things get thrown in them: a word, an observation, sometimes a line, and sometimes even more. But I don’t demand of those notebooks that they make sense or cohere. I just demand that this is the mind being open. This is all the senses being open to experience. In time, those things accumulate. There are days when I sit down and I have drafts, and I put them in folders, and I go back and work on drafts. All of that stuff is part of the writing. For me, the real sweet spot: it’s the time of day. If I can arrange to write at the time when I am at my utmost concentration and energy levels, then the writing will happen faster; it will happen in a little more expedient manner. And for me, that sweet spot is the middle of the night, and when I say middle, I mean 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 AM. It’s because, I mean, I am my biorhythms. I ama night person, and all my life I struggled against it. When I was in college, of course, I would stay up till 4:00 AM, but then I would get myself up at, you know, 9:00 AM for some class. It wasn’t until I was actually in grad school when I got the advice to really think about when I had the most energy, and that’s when that’s what you give to your writing. Everything else can possibly be done with less energy. You know, with less concentration. Save your best self for your best work. It seems obvious now, but you know, back then it was a revelation. And then I started thinking about, “Well, when am I at my optimal?” And I realized, “Oh, that’s when I’m at my optimal: in the middle of the night.” So that’s what I try to do if I’m going to be writing. I may not write every day, but my best writing happens in the middle of the night. Sometimes it happens in the afternoon, but usually, in the middle of the night.
So, everyone’s different. I suppose the best advice I could give to any person who is writing: that each person is different. There are no rules to what’s going to be your sweet spot. You’ve got to find your sweet spot.
CB
You’ve been teaching at the University of Virginia for many years and across several generations of students. Thinking about this advice you’ve given, and thinking about the students that you’ve had, what could today’s generations of writers learn from previous generations? And relatedly, what do you see as the strengths of the writers that are coming up right now? What gifts can they offer to the world?
RD
Wow. This is really cool. That’s a cool question. First of all, I think that today’s generation could learn to slow down. And when I say slow down, I mean slow down even in terms of just how they absorb information. I know that’s difficult; we’ve all been sped up crazily. But the torrent—I should say the deluge of information that comes at them every day, that they’re very used to now, all of the social media, just everything—has reduced their attention span, but also their patience. Now, to me, when a poem really, really touches you, time falls away. For that moment, you’re suspended in a kind of a timeless bubble. The world is swirling around you; you’re aware of it. Perhaps a lyric is a great example of this; in every lyric, I think you step out of time for a moment. The pressure of the world is there, but you step out.
Now, for them, it’s getting, I think, increasingly difficult to step out, or to find that timeless moment, even in this swirl. And so, you [must] learn to pay attention. And also just to—it sounds terribly old-fashioned—but you know, to go and to take a real walk without your phone, or with it turned off; to stop very still in the middle of a lawn and just watch things go by without comment, without engaging, just let it absorb. That is something I think could be very valuable.
I would even suggest to them—although I’m sure they would balk—that they should try writing by hand.And the reason why is because, again, it would slow them down. And they would have to listen in their head, in theirmind, to feel whatever music the language is building, without seeing it on the page first.
What they can teach us…now I’m going to pop to that because what I think they can offer to the world is a way of navigating this swirl of information and finding that moment of contemplation in a poem, without saying to their readers, “You have to turn your back on that world.” It’s kind of almost impossible to turn our backs on the world that we’re in today unless you’re going to go to a desert island somewhere. But how to be able to find that moment of repose in the middle of all of this world is something they can teach us. I’m still struggling to do it, you know, because I grew up differently. I grew up thinking, “Oh, radio plays!” you know, things like that. And I grew up thinking that [about] just curling up with a book, the physical sensation of turning the pages of a book, and so many of them don’t even have that anymore. So if they don’t have that tactile sensation of turning the pages, they begin to lose their tactile sense. I mean, this is something that’s another part of the slowing down.
I had a colleague who was a Spanish poet in the Spanish Department. He was teaching a course in I believe early 19th century Spanish poetry. One of the practices of the class was that they would do it the way that those poets did it. They would read the books. They would take notes by hand. There were no cell phones. They had to use a—he said they could use a pen instead of a quill, so that was nice—but, oh, the students, at first they were just furious, and then by the end of the class they said, “Something happened. Something woke up in me.”
CB
Another poem in Playlist for the Apocalypse that I found myself drawn to was the poem “Voiceover.” To quote part of it, it reads, “It’s like a dream where a voice whispers / Open your mouth and you do, / but it’s not your mouth anymore / because now you’re all throat, / a tunnel skewered by air.” I just really love those lines and the way that the body is present throughout the entire collection. Has poetry taught you something about the relationship between the body and the mind that you would offer for people to consider?
RD
Oh, that’s a great question. Absolutely, it has taught me something, and I’m glad that you phrased it that way because the body has often been present in a lot of my poems, if not physically—though I think it has—but also just in terms of the auditory and the tactile and things like that. What poetry has taught me, first of all, is that that relationship changes. I do believe, and I’ve always believed, that one of the challenges in writing poetry is to engage the body so that your reader will breathe in consort with you—with how you envision the poem—so that even if they are not reading it aloud, [they would] read a poem and subconsciously be forming the words in their mouth, [which]will influence how your emotion is calibrated. I mean, one of the things I do—I’m going off on a little tangent…
CB
Oh, please do!
RD
…One of the things I will do, especially with undergraduate students, is start the semester with a lesson in jaw placement when you speak certain words or certain sounds. Like, the sound “eek,” which makes your jaw pull back into a kind of a grimace, which is a sign of fright and defensiveness, and how, “ooh,” is a forward motion. So I go through all of the sounds—you know, A, E, I, O, U—and say, “These are some of your tools to work with; if you’re looking for a word and you’re trying to make us anxious, then consider the fact that the sound of the word will sometimes help you just as much as the meaning of the word.” And so, that’s engaging the body as well.
What I have learned in poetry is that the engagement of the body goes beyond just the mouth and the jaw and the sound of the words, but actually in the physical presence of a body, which then gets transmuted into thoughts about the mind—so philosophy, basically. And I think a lot of that has come about not necessarily to the craft of the poem, but to life.
When I began to take dancing lessons, I had to put my body in the air and suddenly I was much more aware of my body than I’ve ever been in my life. When you’re young, you don’t think of your body: it’s there, it does its thing, you know. When you’re older, you say, “Do this thing,” and the body says, “What?!” you know. And so you learn to be aware of that.
I got MS (Multiple Sclerosis) about twenty some odd yearsago, and then learned that the mind sometimes will control the body in very distressing ways. So then how do you say to the mind, “I’m not going to listen to you right now. I know what this is about and I’m going to figure a way around it”? That was my own personal journey, but it also affected the poetry. I’m not sure exactly how and to what extent that is going to go, but I do know that because of that physical presence of the body making itself known in my life, that I’ve had to alter certain ways of writing. It’s hard for me to write by hand now. I do sometimes, but I’ve had to learn how to engage (earlier on) with typing, with, you know, printouts, and I’ve had students that helped me figure out dictation, and how to do it the least invasive way so that I don’t hear my own voice. So again, that’s the younger generation teaching the older generation. So that’s going to affect the quality of the poems as well, the way that they’re made. It’s all interrelated; it’s so interrelated, and I find that exciting. I think for a young writer, it can be daunting. It’s challenging to realize that it’s all interrelated.
CB
Speaking of how you come to the page, I want to ask a question about your time as Poet Laureate of the United States. Maybe I’m just speaking for myself, but I’m willing to bet most poets have daydreamed about being the Poet Laureate. Those daydreams are probably lofty compared to the reality of the work entailed by that position. Could you share a little bit about how your time as Poet Laureate and the responsibility of that position had an effect, if any, on how you approached your work and how you approached the page?
RD
Well, you know, first of all, when I became Poet Laureate, there had not been a history of people of my age—at that time, 40, I think it was—to be Poet Laureate, so it wasn’t on my radar at all. It was a complete surprise to be asked. And it did change my relationship with the writing itself because suddenly there was—even more than when I got the Pulitzer—there was a sense of the world out there and my responsibility or not to that world as Poet Laureate. And I say that because, almost immediately, I got lots of letters from people telling me what I should do, basically. Not in a mean way, you know, but in listening to these letters and realizing we’re coming from all walks of life, all sorts of people, all ages. And, they were basically saying, “We were taught that poetry was something that was lofty, and we probably wouldn’t understand it…” and, you know, “…poetry was like an exam question: you get it right or wrong,” and it was so different from how I experienced poetry that I knew that that was, in a certain way, my responsibility—as a poet and as someone who was representing all of poetry—to try to alleviate. It affected the way I did my work, though when I write I’m not thinking about an audience, I’m not thinking about educating anyone or anything like that, but at some point, when I’m revising, I am aware of the world out there, and I’m aware of the fact that someone’s going to be hopefully reading this. So that’s part of it. The reality of the job is it depends on who does it. When I came in, you know, everyone who had been Poet Laureate before basically kind of said, “Oh, I’m Poet Laureate!”, you know, and had a crown on their head, except for Gwendolyn Brooks, who, when she was the Poetry Consultant, she actually invited school children into the Library of Congress to talk to them about poetry, so she was also outward reaching.
Because of those letters, I realized that the best thing I could do is to bring poetry into everyday life and to be a presence as a living, breathing poet in the world. That doesn’t mean that I am that aware all the time—when I’m writing, I’m writing. But when I’m out there being Poet Laureate, I was going to be Poet Laureate. It entails a lot of planning of my own, you know, going and accepting invitations and talking about poetry. But the job itself was left up to me to kind of decide. There was a bi-weekly poetry series that I curated and I invited people, but that was the only real “task” that was on the books. The rest was just kind of Well, you know, whatever you want to do. And I said, “Well, we’re just going to get poetry out there.” So, it was kind of a, you know, “fly by the city of your pants” kind of thing, which was fun then because I got to plan what I wanted to do and then let them find the money to do it. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t.
CB
I’d love to know what books or which authors you’re reading right now, and what’s compelling to you about their work?
RD
Right now, I’m working on a memoir, so I am trying not to read memoirs, but also not reading a lot of poetry at the moment, I’ve been reading fiction. So let me think. There’s one nonfiction book that I think is really fabulous. It’s called Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf, and this book was recommended to me by someone when they discovered that I shared a birthday with Goethe—you know how it is when you’re a kid, you look up who has your birthday and then subconsciously kind of wonder if you’re like them or not. So I’ve always been fascinated by Goethe, who also was a writer who went and balanced the back and forth between the public self and the private writer. This book is all about that period of time in the little town of Jena in Germany, where Goethe and Schiller and all these people came together, and how they were considered rebels, and how they actually changed the whole notion of Romanticism. I always thought that they were really quite influential, but it’s a fascinating book, and it also helps me, I think, in terms of working on my memoir. So, it’s a big fat book, so I’ve been reading that. And then for relaxation, when that makes my head begin to swim, I’ve been reading, as my guilty pleasure, Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, which is kind of the flash science fiction. I love it because it’s, well, it’s kind of fabulous and full of so many scientific details about robots and stuff that I get to turn off one part of my mind and concentrate on figuring out the science of it. But that’s for relaxation.
In terms of my poetry intake, what I have been doing recently instead of reading full books, I’ve been just concentrating on online Poem-a-Day, Poetry Foundation, you know, the daily Rattle, these poetry things which just pop a poem up there every day and then I get to read 3, 4, or 5 poems a day before I get out of bed. It’s a great feeling because I start my day with poetry, and then I get up and then I face the rest of it.
CB
I have a few last rapid fire questions. When you keep your place in a book, do you prefer to use a bookmark or do you dogear your pages?
RD
I’ve never doggeared my pages. It just drives me mad. I like a book pristine. I have thousands of bookmarks, and I usually lose them, so I end up sticking a piece of paper in there. If the book has come from the public library, I’ll have a to-do slip and I’ll stick that in there. That’s how I do it.
CB
Do you write notes in the margins of your books as you read your personal copies or do you keep them clean?
RD
I used to write notes in them and I don’t do it anymore. So what I will do is take a little post-it sometimes and stick it in there if I have a real question or something I want to make a note of. I keep them clean.
CB
What do you think is the best way to organize a bookshelf: by color, author, or some other way?
RD
This is a personal thing that depends on what you’re doing. I tend to organize them by author, last name first. Though there are some subsections. So for instance, all the poetry is together, all the fiction is together. I don’t mix them up that way, and all the nonfiction is in a certain part. I also have a certain section of books by former students. And then that one is also organized alphabetically, but it’s its own little subsection. I save organization by color for my drafts when I put drafts of writing into folders. I’ll put them in according to color and not according to any theme or title.
Cameron Barnett is a poet and teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the collections, Murmur and The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water, winner of the Autumn House Press 2017 Rising Writer Contest and finalist for the 49th NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. His newest work is a chapbook collection titled The Bones We Lose, published by Chatham University’s Fourth River literary magazine. Cameron is a graduate of Taylor Allderdice High School and Duquesne University, and he holds his MFA and MAT from the University of Pittsburgh. He served as the 2022-2024 Emerging Black Writer in Residence for Chatham University’s MFA program. He is the winner of the 2019 Emerging Artist Award for the Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Awards. Cameron’s work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America. He teaches middle school English language arts at his alma mater.
Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995. Born in Akron, Ohio, she received her BA summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Her many works include Thomas and Beulah (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), Sonata Mulattica, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Collected Poems 1974-2004, and her most recent work, Playlist for the Apocalypse. She is the editor of The Best American Poetry 2000 and The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry (2011); her 2016 book, Collected Poems 1974–2004, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Her awards and honors include the 2021 Gold Medal for Poetry by the American Academy of Arts & Letters—the Academy’s highest honor—as the sixteenth (and third female and first African-American) poet in the Medal’s 110-year history. In 2022, she was honored by the Poetry Foundation with a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and by the Library of Congress with the Bobbitt Prize, both for lifetime achievement. To date, 29 honorary doctorates have been bestowed upon Rita Dove, most recently in 2022 from her graduate alma mater, The University of Iowa. A member of PEN America, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rita Dove holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn. Her full bio is available here.
