"I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age." -- Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove (born 28 August 1952) is an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1993, the first African American to be appointed, and received a second special appointment in 1999. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
"All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.""Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.""Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.""For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.""For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.""Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.""Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.""I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.""I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.""I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.""I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.""I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.""I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.""I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.""I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.""I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.""I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.""I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.""I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.""I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.""I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!""I write short stories, and I wrote a play.""If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer.""If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.""In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.""Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.""It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.""It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.""It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.""Libraries are where it all begins.""My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends.""My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.""One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits.""People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.""Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.""Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.""The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.""The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.""The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.""The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings.""There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.""There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.""To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.""Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.""What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!""What writing does is to reveal.""When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.""Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.""You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible."
Dove was born in Akron, Ohio to Ray Dove, the first African American chemist to work in the U.S. tire industry (as research chemist at Goodyear), and Elvira Hord, who achieved honors in high school and would share her passion for reading with her daughter. In 1970 Dove graduated from Buchtel High School as a Presidential Scholar, making her one of the 100 top American high school graduates that year. Later, Dove graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Miami University in 1973 and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977. In 1974 she held a Fulbright Scholarship from Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany.
Career
Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. She received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and in 1993, at age 40, she was named Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress, an office she held from 1993 to 1995 as the youngest person, and as the first and to date only African American. Gwendolyn Brooks had been the last Consultant in Poetry in 1985-86, prior to U.S. Congress' action renaming the position Poet Laureate.
Rita Dove served as Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1999/2000, along with Louise Glück and W. S. Merwin. In 2004 then-governor Mark Warner of Virginia appointed her to a two-year position as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth. In her public posts, Dove concentrated on spreading the word about poetry and increasing public awareness of the benefits of literature. As Poet Laureate, she also brought together writers to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists. Since 1989 she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she holds the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English.
Dove’s work cannot be confined to a specific era or school in contemporary literature; her wide-ranging topics and the precise poetic language with which she captures complex emotions defy easy categorization. Her most famous work to date is Thomas and Beulah, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1986, a collection of poems loosely based on the lives of her maternal grandparents, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. She has published nine volumes of poetry, a book of short stories (Fifth Sunday, 1985), a collection of essays (The Poet's World, 1995), and a novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992).
In 1994 she published a play The Darker Face of the Earth; revised stage version 1996), which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon in 1996 (first European production: Royal National Theatre, London, 1999). She collaborated with composer John Williams on the song cycle "Seven for Luck" (first performance: Boston Symphony, Tanglewood, 1998, conducted by the composer). For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed ... in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams's music ... a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey. Dove's latest collection of poetry, Sonata Mulattica, was published in April 2009.
Besides her Pulitzer Prize, she has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them 22 honorary doctorates, the 1996 National Humanities Medal / Charles Frankel Prize, the 3rd Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities in 1997, and most recently, the 2006 Commonwealth Award of Distinguished Service in Literature, the 2008 Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and the 2009 Premio Capri (Italy). From 1994-2000 she was a senator (member of the governing board) of the national academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa, and she is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Personal life
Dove married Fred Viebahn, a German-born writer, journalist, and teacher, in 1979. Their daughter Aviva was born in 1983. The couple are avid ballroom dancers, and have participated in a number of competitions. Dove and her husband live in Charlottesville, Virginia.
