Leading Us to Revelation: On Rita Dove

Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize when I was in elementary school, and she was the US poet laureate by the time I was in high school. From the first time a teacher told me Dove’s name, I have made it my duty to be a student of her work. I have learned that she uses the oddest pieces of the world and makes of them the stuff of lyric poetry. She comes to this through particular and peculiar language that does the work of observation and examination. In a Rita Dove poem every image is pinprick small, making for a stinging papercut that leads us to revelations as seductive as they are harrowing:

                                        O why

did you pick that idiot flower?
Because it was the last one
and you knew

it was going to die.
—From “Heroes”

By 2004, in a prestigious PhD program for poetry, I was living that story so old to us now that we sometimes think of it as a cliché: the Black one, or one of the only Black ones, who is almost always offended. Students and teachers needed to touch my hair and to ask me to lead class when they bothered to put as broad a subject as “Black poetry” on a day of the syllabus.

Somewhere in all of this, Rita Dove appeared yet again to save my life, to remind me of possibility. As if her poems had not done enough work, she wrote a letter to Poetry magazine’s editor, published in the June–July 2004 issue. I had no idea that I needed someone to fight for me, that I needed to be reminded of my ancestry, that women like Rita Dove had always been writing with someone like me in mind. This letter did three things for me:

1. It let me know that some of my feelings of invisibility had a lot to do with who I thought needed to be looking at me.
2. It gave me a framework for what my life would become, not just as a poet, but as a kind of literary activist who understands that our beloved community of writers is yet a microcosm of a larger society. I would always have to be vigilant, prepared to say it when I saw us falling short, not just in our art but in our treatment and consideration of one another. And,
3. It let me know that it was okay for me to expect everyone to prepare for and know the tradition from which I was born, as I have prepared for and know the tradition of John Ashbery and Robert Hass and Charles Wright.

The person, the poems, the genius. Poetry is ever indebted to Rita Dove.