Rita Dove

Poet

• Born: August 28, 1952
• Birthplace: Akron, Ohio

Poet

The recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a poet laureate of the United States, Dove has encouraged public appreciation of poetry. While some of her poems describe her childhood, others take readers to faraway places and distant time periods. Her vivid images invite insight in readers of all races.

Areas of achievement: Education; Literature; Poetry

Early Life

Rita Frances Dove grew up in the industrial Midwest city of Akron, Ohio. Her parents taught Dove and her three siblings to value books of all kinds. Her father, Ray A. Dove, earned a graduate degree in chemistry. He encountered racial discrimination in the rubber industry and worked as an elevator operator for many years before joining Goodyear’s research team. Her mother, Elvira Elizabeth Hord Dove, encouraged her work ethic, and both parents supported Dove’s decision to become a poet. She was active in high school extracurricular activities, playing the cello and leading the majorettes. Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet who said that daily life can inspire worthwhile poetry, Dove wrote many poems about her upbringing.

Dove graduated as a Presidential Scholar from racially mixed Buchtel High School in 1970. In 1973, she graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Ohio with a major in English. She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study the German language at Tübingen, Germany, where she noted the isolation often experienced by black German women. Dove attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, obtaining a master of fine arts degree in 1977. At Iowa, she met Fred Viebahn, a German writer. They married in 1979 and in 1983 had a daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn.

Life’s Work

Dove’s poems have appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and Slate. Her published poetry collections began with The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), followed by Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), and Sonata Mulattica (2009). She also published a short-story collection, Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); The Darker Face of the Earth (1994), a verse play; and The Poet’s World (1995), a collection of lectures.

Foremost among Dove’s awards are the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, which she received in 1987 (for Thomas and Beulah), and her appointment as poet laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. She was the second African American to win a Pulitzer, following Gwendolyn Brooks, who received it in 1950. Dove also has received more than one dozen honorary doctorates and has served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She received the Great American Artist Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1993 and was recipient of the Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award in the Literary Arts in 2001.

Dove’s poems depict an array of time periods, places, people, and themes. For example, her characters in Museum are historical figures; she brings to life Catherine of Siena of fourteenth century Italy and the Chinese emperor Liu Shengin during the Han dynasty. Dove employs extensive research in history, language, mythology, and music, in preparation for writing in the idiom of a particular place and time.

Dove’s poems often are autobiographical. Many works relate incidents in her childhood when her family experienced racial discrimination. In “Wingfoot Lake,” she describes a segregated company picnic and finds ironic humor in the fact that families of both races eat identical brand-name foods.

Dove also is credited with using innovative poetic forms. In her most famous work, Thomas and Beulah, she tells the story of her maternal grandparents from both of their points of view. Thomas speaks in the first poems, followed by Beulah’s perspective. They talk about the small details of daily life in a way that exposes larger realities. An example is Thomas’s purchase of a used encyclopedia set. Because one volume is missing, the books do not discuss “war” or “zebras.”

Dove has said that the essence of poetry is thriftiness, paring down the topic to only what is necessary. She is often praised for her use of imagination, dialect, and musical rhythms. Dove uses many different poetic forms. Sometimes she writes in free verse without a formal rhyme scheme. Some of her poems are narrative, as in “Shakespeare Say,” while others are descriptive, as in “The Copper Beach.”

Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989 and was writer-in-residence at Tuskegee Institute in 1982. She has been Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia since 1989. She also is heavily involved in music, taking part in operatic singing and playing the cello and period instruments. She has written text for musical works by such composers as Alvin Singleton and John Williams. Dove supports collaboration between artistic fields, such as her poems accompanying photographs by Tamarra Kaida in The Other Side of the House (1988).

Significance

Dove urges people from all walks of life to read and write poetry. She feels that oppressed people can find comfort in poems and advocates enjoyment without fear of misunderstanding their meaning. Her own poems encourage such appreciation because they are often humorous, as in “Used,” in which she describes falling out of bed because of slippery sheets. Dove also aids understanding by providing helpful guides to the reader, such as a chronology at the end of Thomas and Beulah.

Dove’s poems also are educational, offering depictions of historical figures with whom many readers are unfamiliar. For example, Sonata Mulattica is a series of poems about George Bridgetower, a mixed-race violin prodigy who impressed Beethoven in Vienna in 1803. Her work also examines racism. “Parsley” is a poem about Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who killed thousands of African Americans because he claimed they could not pronounce the letter “r” in the Spanish word for parsley.

Although Dove’s experience of being a black and a woman informs some of her poetry, to many important topics her race and gender are irrelevant. Regardless of her subject, Dove’s work aims to produce vivid insights in readers of all races.

Bibliography

Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Conversations with Rita Dove. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Presents texts of more than a dozen interviews conducted over fifteen years that touch on her hobbies as well as her determination to maintain quality in her writing.

Love, Steve, and David Giffels. Wheels of Fortune. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1999. Details Dove’s childhood and her father’s rubber industry employment.

Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Examines the relationship between Dove’s racial identity and her poems, as well as other recurrent themes in her work.

Righelato, Pat. Understanding Rita Dove. Columbia: University Press of South Carolina, 2006. American literature professor critically analyzes seven of Dove’s poetry collections, identifying repeated themes such as Dove’s emphasis on family.