Rita Dove: life and literary contributions

Rita Dove is perhaps the most representative African-American poet of our times and one of the most important poets of the 20th in the United States. Born in Akron, Ohio in 1952, she was the daughter of the first Black research chemist, active in the tire industry. She was an outstanding high school student, invited in this posture at the White House in 1970. After high school, she went on to graduate summa cum laudae from the Miami University in Florida and to achieve a master degree in Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. Married with a German writer in 1979, her daughter was born in 1983.

Her first collection of poetry, the Yellow House on the Corner, was published in 1980, and many other literary works followed throughout the 80s and 90s, including a novel (Through the Ivory Gate) in 1992 and a verse drama (the Darker Face of Earth) in 1994. Her entire literary performance was rewarded with a Pulitzer Price in 1987, thus becoming the second African-American woman to receive this award, as recognition of her prestigious writings.

Rita Dove's vast universe of writing may be approached, in the beginning, from an excellent interview with her in 1994. Here, Rita Dove lets us understand, at least in part, the process of writing and how she took up on it and began to write. According to her, she discovered verse early in her childhood, in the home of culture loving parents, who had "two half-walls of bookshelves" and encouraged the children to "read whatever we wanted." The seed was sown: Rita began frequenting the school's library, where she "browsed" among different poets and literary periods.

The fact that she was only eleven or twelve at that time meant that she was reading simply for the pleasure of it rather than for the critical interpretations we are used to. Poetry had no time, no place or history at that time for her and it simply went straight to the soul. Shakespeare was not necessarily the greatest writer of all times, but rather a writer whom she enjoyed.

From reading to writing, the step to take is generally quite small and Rita Dove had no hesitations in making it, although this didn't happen until college, according to her. Several teachers had influenced her in this sense, probably as much as the creative writing classes she took. At a certain point in the life of any writer, the revelation of creation appears and the writer pursues his destiny. For Rita, this came when she realized how much of her life revolved around writing and writing classes. As Rita mentions, "I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing courses, and I said, "Well maybe you need to figure out if this is what you want to do." She obviously wanted to write and she dedicated more and more time to it from that time onwards.

In her works, Rita Dove acts in several different directions. One direction would be observational. Indeed, having traveled to Berlin, to Ireland, having met an large amount of different people, each with their different personalities and, additionally, having read a lot and having thus accumulated additional knowledge on several different issues, she can practically present, in her own unique style, almost anything. It is no wonder that her subjects range from "herself, her grandparents, an ancient Chinese princess, a German woman widowed during World War II, mythological characters, the blues singer Bessie Smith, or even a fossilized fish."

Life experience is, in this sense, a definite source of inspiration for Rita Dove. She herself mentions that "significant events in the private sphere are rarely written up in history books, although they make up the life-sustaining fabric of humanity." Events in private sphere are a cause for reflection and for presenting them otherwise than under the strict historical, objective microscope.

Her grandparents, for example, are a definite source of inspiration for Rita Dove's poems. Thomas and Beulah, besides winning her the Pulitzer Price, represent the quintessence of her work, as many critics have emphasized. For Ekaterini Georgoudaki, Thomas "preserves and conveys to the next generation of blacks their rich cultural heritage and the communal values which many of them lost when they migrated from the rural south to the industrial north." So, Rita Dove is not an isolated poet, one that has broken away from tradition and heritage. Even if I have emphasized the surreal component and will be discussing it further below with strict reference to the poem Sic Itur Ad Astra, the real component is also strong and influences many of her works in incredible ways.

The encyclopedic component that I have referred to, related to the poet's capacity for accumulation and observation, is presented in many poems such as Robert Schumann, or: Musical Genius Begins with Afflictions and Catherine of Alexandria, but also in Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream (however, connected with the surrealist dream component), where she speaks of the famous African-American writer.

The second direction that she uses in her writings is a reflective one. Of course, the reflective component is generally present in any writer's portfolio, but Rita Dove finds almost any subject to reflect upon, each opening a new imaginary universe for her, somewhat surreal, but with direct tangency to reality.

One of the best examples in this sense and one of my favorite poems is Sic Itur Ad Astra. This poem engulfs both dimensions as I have briefly described them in the paragraphs here above. First of all, the title is in Latin, comes from Virgil and it means thus is the way to the stars. We expect such a title from Rita Dove, given the discussion we have previously had: her vast culture and reading material allows her to pick a phrase used by the Roman poet Virgil. Of course, if the title was "Thus is the way to the stars," we would have had a certain incentive to go on reading, but with it in Latin, we are even more inclined to proceed. The choice for the title is essential in a poem, because it conditions the continuation of the act of reading.

The first line is revelatory for the Surreal universe I was referring to: "Bed, where are you flying to?." Here we are faced with a real entity, the bed, that, under our very eyes, becomes the premise for a surreal experience. Obviously, in the real world we generally have no flying beds. So, from the first line, we are entitled to believe further on that we are no longer in our real universe and environment, but that we are being transposed to something very different: the poet's own Universe, one functioning perhaps by different variables than we know.

The dream, a constant element in Surrealist works as the motive for transposition, clearly appears in the subsequent lines: "I went to sleep / an hour ago, now / I'm on a porch / open to the world" and following "I don't remember a thing / not even dreaming." As we can see, the poet is having the revelation of non-dreaming or anti-dreaming, in the sense that she prefers to deny the actual recognizable reality of a dream and makes the reader believe in the existence of the parallel Universe where the bed will take her.

The final metaphor of the poem is enchanting and may be one of the trademarks for Rita Dove. The association between people in long white shirts, children and priests simply sound well: "for aren't we all children / in our over-size shirts (clothes) / white priests of the night!." The obvious antithesis between white and the night's blackness creates a certain awe towards the priests: are they 'night priests' in the sense that they serve occult force? The fact that they are white priests may lead us to believe otherwise. Additionally, the association with people and children is full of mystery and hidden significance.

This is just a small part of Rita Dove's wonderful uniqueness. In the same poem, but also in Golden Oldie or Dusting, we are also surprised by the way her poem is arranged. There is no poetic rule applied, such as rhyme or strict verse with a certain measure. There is also no connection with prose writing, as one sentence may start in a verse and finish in another. The sentence is written simply as the poet feels the need to put it down on paper.

Several critical consideration on the form of Rita Dove's poetry have shown that, while being "sensitive to the nuances of language, rhythm and meter." She doesn't shy away from experimenting with different poetic formats, such as sonnets, even if she doesn't necessarily respect the strict Shakespearian format. This is of course a poetical license on her behalf and she herself specifies that "much has been said about the many ways to 'violate' the sonnet in the service of American speech or modern love or whatever; I will simply say that I like how the sonnet comforts even while its prim borders (but what a pretty fence!) are stultifying." Obviously, I personally wouldn't expect Rita Dove to stick with strict literary conventions without part of her poems' charm to be lost.