You Have to Be Ferocious: A Conversation with Rita Dove

© Fred Viebahn

Rita Dove has had a storied career—winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Poet Laureate, author of eleven volumes of poetry, including a poem that is on NASA’s first mission to Jupiter—and yet talking to Rita is like talking to someone who can’t wait to see what’s next. I had the great pleasure of studying with her at the University of Virginia, but despite our many talks during those three life-changing years, this interview was my first real chance to ask about her work. We began our conversation at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) where I teach and where I was joined by fellow poet Jesse Graves, who directs ETSU’s Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative. We continued the conversation via email and phone conversations. 

–Valencia Robin

***

Valencia Robin: Rita, your poetry career is so expansive that many people might be surprised to learn that you’ve also published a play, a novel, and a book of short stories, as well as a number of music collaborations and commissions. What distinguishes poetry from other genres for you? What is it about writing poems that keeps you coming back?

Rita Dove: Poetry is my essential other, my first love, because it gets at the very bones of language, deeper than the skeleton of language. Just the other day I was teaching an undergraduate poetry workshop and one student blurted out, “I can’t believe we’re all hot and bothered over a semicolon.” Poetry puts into words things we have no words for. I think that’s part of it. But it’s also a way of dropping language so that someone else can pick it up and breathe in the same rhythm, which means it has all the challenges of music. It has all the challenges of an essay. And it can build a world, like a short story or a novel. A poem can do it all! So that’s what keeps me coming back.

Jesse Graves: One of the things I love most about your poetry is how you write about music and dance, for instance, the process and feeling of dancing in American Smooth and other poems. Can you talk about how these art forms inspire your poetry? 

RD: I began playing cello at the age of ten, which was a kind of preamble to writing poetry because I was also reading a lot; I read everything on the bookshelves at home that I could understand. The way language can sing, the way every language has its own cage of sound, also made an impression on me. But I began by writing prose—short stories, science fiction to be precise—because my brother, who’s two years older, loved science fiction, and I wanted to do everything he did, that sibling rivalry thing—so I read all of his sci-fi magazines and then started writing back my own little stories starring black girl astronauts. Even so, I wanted the language to sing as much as that cello did. I practiced cello, but I played with words, trying to get that soaring lilt or melancholy growl into every sentence—because what language can do, and what poetry can do even more intensely than other art forms, is orchestrate how you feel inside. Once I had a writing professor who said, “Don’t try to describe music, it’s impossible.” So of course, I did just that—the mandolin in Thomas and Beulah, the violinist George Bridgetower in Sonata Mulattica, Billie Holiday and Henry Martin ringing the hours in a poem called “Bellringer.” 

How dancing entered that matrix—well, that was a wonderful accident. I’d been playing music and writing poetry, but I hadn’t been dancing with any kind of conscious effort until my husband and I took up ballroom dancing; we also do Argentine tango. And the reason we started ballroom dancing was simply because—well, it’s not simple at all, really. Where to start? OK, here goes: Lightning struck our house, and it burned down. This was years ago; no one was hurt, and those sainted firefighters saved so many important items—photographs, even some artwork. The next morning the university librarian showed up and taught us how to identify items buried in the debris by their shapes, and we went to work, sifting through the ashes. It’s astonishing what can be recovered if you know how to look; I could go on about that for hours, but don’t worry, I won’t! After about a week of our salvaging, our neighbors decided we needed cheering up and invited us to a dinner-dance that weekend—it was a benefit, for a good cause; the whole neighborhood was going. But it was black-tie, which meant we had to come up with formal attire. Now mind you, our closets had gone up in flames, too. So, we were still wearing borrowed clothes and the first item I bought for my new wardrobe was an evening gown. Which was actually a great way to ease into the enormity of starting over, because it was so outrageous. And we just did it. We went to the gala. After dinner, the band started playing. Fred and I had always loved to dance, but when I saw these couples waltzing and foxtrotting around the room, I sighed and said, “I always wanted to learn how to do that.” Who wouldn’t want to learn how to do that kind of floating? One of our neighbors overheard me and signed the whole neighborhood up for dance lessons. Amazing, right? 

For the year it took to rebuild the house, we danced. We were insane. I mean, practically every night I dragged my poor husband, Fred, to a different dance lesson. For the first two months he’d go “No, no, no”—and then suddenly something clicked, and he was the one saying, “Let’s do a dance class tonight.” Weekends we’d roll up the carpets in our rental house and practice. We were in survival mode, and dance became a way of reclaiming joy. Poetry was the last thing on my mind. Then, out of the blue, came the first lines of the poem “Fox Trot Fridays.”

Dance was what we held on to while navigating through the loss, through the draining business of trying to reconstruct the house, finding contractors, studying blueprints, stuff like that. But there were also moments when all we were thinking about was how to stand centered in each other’s arms and move like a breeze. Those were the moments I realized, “Ah, this moves like a line of poetry.” 

I want to ask Valencia a quick question pertaining to dancing. When you were a student, did we dance in our dance space?

VR: You gave my cohort dance lessons, you and Fred, and then we danced at our graduation.

RD: I thought so! You all danced at your graduation, but the dance lessons were a mini poetry lesson, too.

VR: It was wonderful. I remember that some students who’d graduated, but were still on campus were like, “What—wait, you’re having dance lessons?” So, I invited them to come, too. 

RD: That’s right!

VR: So, Rita, you’re known for your portrait and persona poems. I’m thinking of poems in your most recent collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, but also Sonata Mulattica, your book about George Bridgetower, the biracial violinist who was friends with Beethoven. What is it about writing in someone else’s voice that you find so appealing?

RD: Writing in someone else’s voice is one way to get very, very close to your own emotions. A poem that’s overtly confessional often has an element of masking to it. There’s a mode of confession that invites one into its secrets. And I’m not saying anything against that; it’s just one other convention. With a persona poem, people often think, “Oh, this is a stranger talking.” But even if that speaker is an 18th-century male violinist, I’m listening for whatever he’s hiding from the outside world. By delving into how George Polgreen Bridgetower felt about performing—playing violin onstage and being a constant novelty in London society—I got closer to understanding that feeling in myself than I could’ve gotten through a poem written in first person. I do find that an essential element of any piece written from a standpoint other than the author’s requires opening yourself to every aspect of that other human being. And if you open yourself to them, then you’re also opening your own heart to yourself.

VR: And do you do a lot of research? Do you want to know everything? Or the opposite?

RD: I do a lot of research. I want to know everything. Of course, I can’t know everything, but I want to. For instance, in Sonata Mulattica, I knew Beethoven had composed a sonata in George Bridgetower’s honor—but where does the story begin? I didn’t want to be a historical tourist exclaiming, “Oh look, beautiful gowns!” à la Bridgerton. I want to get inside the era. What did it feel like to walk down London streets in 1790? Because that’s when George first arrived with his father. He was ten years old. What did he see, what did it smell like? Were there stares? How different did he feel? All of which meant research: first going to census reports to see how many Africans were living there, then checking what might have been a typical meal, standard hygiene, the sewage systems. You know, research can be immensely reassuring for poets—actually, for all writers—because we spend so much time staring at that blank page and trying to get the right words; we do a lot of hovering, and it’s reassuring to be able to turn away and settle into concrete data. Very often, I’d be combing through charts and timelines when something would go ting!—and suddenly I’d start writing a poem. In the case of Sonata Mulattica, I would invest a significant chunk of time, two weeks to a month, in research until that ting! came—and then it was Poetry Time. 

VR: I’m going to continue this because I’m curious. Did you know right away that it was going to be a book? Or did you think it would be a series of poems?

RD: Well in that case, I knew it was going to be a book. There was too much to be said and too little known, because Bridgetower drops out of history. A few days after Beethoven finished composing the “Kreutzer Sonata” and they premiered it together, the two got into an argument. No one knows exactly what predicated the quarrel or what was said, but Beethoven shredded the dedication and George Polgreen Bridgetower disappeared from the official records. I found nothing beyond those few facts; there’s a lot more available now. And so, I knew there would be a lot of research, but I wanted to know the rest. How did it feel to meet Beethoven? Why did Beethoven agree to write this sonata when he was going deaf? I’m talking about those kinds of reasons, not only documented “facts.” I knew it was going to be a massive amount of work. I resisted for a while because I didn’t want to write another historical sequence. 

The evolution of Thomas and Beulah was quite different. I started out with six poems about my grandfather playing the mandolin, and it took a while to blossom into the double-sided chronicle of a marriage. In fact, my second book, Museum, opens with the poem “Dusting,” which is in my grandmother’s voice. At the time I didn’t realize that she was saying, “I’ve gotta tell my side of this story, too.” So that’s why that poem appears in both books. 

VR: And did I read somewhere that you discovered a connection between George Bridgetower and Thomas Jefferson?

RD: Yes! Oh, it was fantastic! I mean, this is one of those cases where art meets reality. I knew that the mixed-race violinist, George Bridgetower, had been in Paris when he was about ten years old. His father had brought him there to play concerts at several prestigious venues. This was the same time that Jefferson was in Paris as the United States Minister to France. I found myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it have been great if Jefferson had been to one of young Bridgetower’s concerts?” I wanted to write about this black boy concertizing in a Paris that had Jefferson and Sally Hemings in it. But I couldn’t find proof, so I fretted until finally my husband said, “Just call the poem ‘What Doesn’t Happen’ and write the damn thing.” That got me over the hump. “Okay, okay,” I said, and wrote the poem, and called it “What Doesn’t Happen.” 

Then I got an email from Monticello, which is right up the road from the University of Virginia, which of course Jefferson built; Monticello was his home. The email said, “We’ve come across something in one of Thomas Jefferson’s journals that you might like to see.” I had requested information on Jefferson’s Paris years, and since he always kept meticulous journals—from what flowers were blooming in his garden to the menus for dinners both domestic and foreign—the archivists were on the alert. And sure enough, not only had he listed all the concerts he’d attended in Paris, but each concert’s program—and there it was: George Bridgetower. And I just got this shiver. Jefferson had been there; it had happened. Now Sally Hemings is in my poem, too—I had to put her in there, even though she probably wasn’t at the concert, so the title “What Doesn’t Happen” still stands!

JG: There are so many dimensions in your work: the personal, the historical, the public. I want to ask you about the writing of Thomas and Beulah and how you decided to write about the actual people in your life, your grandparents, and how you decided to tell their story?

RD: Thomas and Beulah began as a much smaller cycle, six poems or so about my grandfather, who died when I was in my teens. After his funeral, the family came together to care for my grandmother. Someone was always there in the house. Because I was too young to date, I pulled weekend duty, but I didn’t mind. We’d always been close, so she talked a lot, but this was a different grandmother, because she was talking about her life with her husband, not my grandfather. She told me stories I had never heard before. The most fantastical was that my grandfather had come up from Tennessee—middle Tennessee or thereabouts—fleeing a lynch mob; he and a friend found work as a song-and-dance team on one of the riverboats and escaped up the Mississippi. I remember being totally gobsmacked—that the small, shy man I called grandaddy had not only been an entertainer, but a fugitive! That he sang for his supper and his life! The story haunted me. That I had known nothing about his past, had assumed there was nothing to know about him before he became my grandfather. I felt shamed, then angry that this man’s bravery and perseverance—like so many so-called “ordinary” people—could be so easily erased. It was then I realized that it was up to me to tell his story. But I needed to grow as a writer, so I read every poetry book I could get my hands on, and I wrote and rewrote. I published two books before I felt ready. I started with help from my mother, who was fantastic. Weekends I’d phone her, just to chat; but she knew I was writing a book of poems about her parents, about their imagined interior lives. We’d talk for a while and then she’d ask, “What do you want to know?” And I’d say, “I have no idea what I want to know.” And we’d talk on, reminiscing, and some of those reminiscences would be what she remembered of her mother. The book grew, and I knew my mom had my back. She never asked to see a single poem—it was her quiet way of saying “I trust you.” 

JG: Knowing that you had your mother’s blessing must’ve been a relief. Any advice for young poets who have family stories that they’d like to preserve in poetry? 

RD: My advice is always to at least record those stories, then see what happens. Otherwise, so many stories will disappear. That’s one aspect. The second one is nerve. You must gather your nerve. At some point, you have to be ferocious. When I finished the book Thomas and Beulah, I thought, “This is poetry, so I’m safe; no one in my family’s going to read it.” Not that anything horrible happens! But then I got the Pulitzer, and I wasn’t safe anymore.

JG: I would like to circle back to a question that Valencia asked earlier, but maybe from a slightly different framework; that you’ve been celebrated, especially for your poetry. But you’ve also written fiction and plays and song cycles. I wonder—how have these different modes and genres of writing informed one another for you?

RD: I’m still working that out but let me give you a couple of touchstones. I went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for grad school, which was a pretty dismal experience except for the fact that I met my husband there. He was part of the International Writing Program, a group of thirty writers from all over the world who’d been invited to spend a semester in America’s heartland. The authors I met in the International Writing Program were bemused by the petty warfare of our workshops; their conception of the life of the artist vis-à-vis their position in the world was a profound contrast to the myopic principles espoused by our university writing programs at the time. Their worldview was heartening. I remember graduating and leaving Iowa determined to blaze my own path. But first, I had to contend with the phenomenon of “the Iowa voice,” a certain monotone declarative style where every word was intoned with a ponderous self-importance that just didn’t sit with me. I needed to get rid of all lingering traces of this Iowa voice before I could find my own voice. So, I started writing short stories. I wrote short stories for about a year, really concentrated on how to shape each telling, pace the trajectory of the narration. That was an important touchstone. Now, I usually know what genre a piece is going to be from the beginning. I knew Through the Ivory Gate was a novel before I set down the first word. It was nothing like a short story, it wasn’t poetry—it was a novel. I don’t know why or how I knew, I just did. The story wanted to unfurl at its own pace; I wanted to see what it was like to watch the story build up into its own world. It was fascinating—but I came back to poetry. 

And playwriting? Well, I wrote plays with my brother when we were kids, mostly radio plays, because my father set up a little microphone, and we could fool around with sound effects. And I love graphic novels, which are almost like plays on paper. And I read a lot of Shakespeare when I was a kid. Gosh, I sound so nerdy! But I love writing plays; in terms of genres, for me drama and poetry are kissing cousins. 

The song cycles I’ve done were collaborations with composers, musicians who brought their own means of expression—the language of music—to the drawing board, and we had to figure out how to understand each other. My first full-fledged musical collaboration was with John Williams. It was instigated by Leonard Slatkin, director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. One of his initiatives involved matching writers with composers; it was his idea to put me and John together. I was like, “fine, I’ll take John Williams!” We started from nothing—no poems, no melodies. John would call and say: “I’m thinking flute and cello,” hum a few bars; I’d send him a couple lines of poetry. We had a great time! 

VR: You were commissioned to write a poem for the Folger Shakespeare Library, and I’m curious—were you given a fair amount of freedom? And how did you find your way to the final poem?

RD: I love the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C. It’s an amazing building, right across from the Supreme Court; when you walk inside, all that governmental business falls away and you enter this magical space. A few years ago, when renovations began on the exterior—the gardens, entryway, foyer—the director contacted me with an idea: wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a “ribbon of text”—those were his words—inscribed along the marble berm leading up to the entrance so, as people rounded the corner, they would find words to read, a poem that would guide them inside. Now, as with any kind of artistic commission—there has to be a spark; I have to think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” But I also need time to tend to that spark, because I can’t write poems at the drop of a hat. I had two years for the Folger commission—a poem etched in stone. It sounded so regal! The catch: in order to match the distance from sidewalk to door, I had at my disposal six hundred characters, including the blank spaces. No one had ever asked such a thing of me before. When I’d worked with composers I’d usually think in terms of lines, so this spatial pacing was going to change the cadence of the piece, too. I knew the interior quite well; but this project involved the exterior, which I couldn’t visit because it was under construction. So, I sent them a list of questions: Tell me what flowers will be planted, what kind of hedges are planned. I needed to imagine what it would look and smell like to walk between them. They sent photographs of the old gardens, which was a start. 

VR: And were you thinking about Shakespeare or the space itself?

RD: Ah, I was thinking about both. I was always thinking about Shakespeare, but I didn’t want to sound like Shakespeare. At the same time, I realized that the space people would be entering wasn’t solely about Shakespeare, so I was channeling the sonnet form a little bit, though this poem had to be slightly shorter than a sonnet because of the allotted space. I was also thinking of the fact that visitors would either be walking into the library, fleeing the madness that is D.C., or ignoring the library because of the madness of D.C. The real challenge, what turned out to be harder than the character count, was knowing that a visitor might start reading the poem at any point along the way, so there could be no beginning. There may be an end, but there’s no beginning. How do you write a poem that can be picked up like that, that could make someone who’d already rounded the corner retrace their steps to read what they’d missed? Many writers would hate the whole idea; I thought it was thrilling. 

JG: We’d love to know what writing projects you’re currently working on.

RD: I’ve been working on a memoir for some time now; I’d say it’s the middle of the third quarter in a very close game. Poems are always brewing, and I’ve also been playing with two assignments I’ve given myself, alternating between extremely minimalist poems and more maximalist, more expansive texts.

VR: Since we’re Facebook friends, I know that you’ve had a busy summer. You reprised your Sonata Mulattica performance and collaboration with pianist William Ransom and violinist Njioma Grevious and you were honored by the minor league Akron RubberDucks with a bobblehead in your likeness, not to mention the opportunity to throw out the season’s first pitch. How did it go?

RD: Communing with musicians always makes me happy; the reunion with Will and Njioma was exhilarating and inspirational. On the other hand, to become a bobblehead and throw out the first pitch for the home baseball team was a double whammy, a combination of glee and terror—in the end, though, it was a riotously joyful experience! My three siblings and most of their families showed up for the game. Luckily there were a few athletes in the family who coached me beforehand—the technique involved in the wind up, timing the ball release—which helped immensely. Let’s just say that I did not shame myself; the pitch was accurate, though of course without the power of a professional.