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Rita Dove (1952- ), American poet, short-story writer and novelist, is known for her careful control of language and for works that manage to be both objective and personal, addressing social issues from a number of differing perspectives. Many of Dove's poems reflect her immense love of history as well as her interest in mythology and her knowledge of the Bible. Literary critic Arnold Rampersad described her as 'surely one of the three or four most gifted young black American poets to appear since LeRoi Jones [. . .] and perhaps the most disciplined and technically accomplished black poet to arrive since Gwendolyn Brooks' (Callaloo, 26; Winter 1986). In addition to Brooks, Dove is often likened to other great American poets such as Langston Hughes and Robert Frost.
Rita Frances Dove was born on 28 August 1952 in Akron, Ohio. Her parents, Ray and Elvira (Hord) Dove, were prominent members of their community. Her father was the first African-American chemist in Akron's tyre industry. Education was important to the Dove family, and Rita demonstrated an aptitude for learning at an early age. She loved to read and discovered poetry while exploring the wide variety of books at her local library. She later recalled that she began to write as early as the third grade, but did not realise that she could make a career out of her passion until she was in college. In 1970 Dove was recognised as one of the top 100 high school seniors in the country, an honour that came with a trip to the White House.
After high school Dove continued her education at Miami University of Ohio, where she was elected to the honour society Phi Beta Kappa, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in English in 1973. After studying briefly at Tübingen University in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, Dove honed her craft at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She completed an MFA in creative writing at Iowa in 1977. Two years later she married German novelist Fred Viebahn, with whom she has one daughter, Aviva.
After having some of her prose published in journals, Dove published two chapbooks of poetry: Ten Poems (1977) and The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980). Although the poems that compose these collections are generally considered to be immature works, scholars have noted in them the seeds of greatness yet to come.
Dove's first full-length collection, the autobiographical The Yellow House on the Corner, was published in 1980. It includes several poems from her 1980 chapbook and a number of new poems. Although reviews of the collection were mixed, even those who faulted the work noted Dove's unique poetic voice. One of the outstanding poems in this collection is 'Geometry'. In it a young girl studying geometry discovers the world in a new way, finding that 'the windows have hinged into butterflies, / sunlight glinting where they've intersected. / They are going to some point true and unproven'. Many critics have read the poem as a statement about poetic vision and the poetic process.
Dove's poetic breakthrough came in 1983 with the publication of her second book-length collection, Museum. Critics noted the maturation that was evident in this text when compared to her first full-length endeavour. Notable poems in this collection include 'Parsley', about the slaughter of thousands of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic in 1937, and 'Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove', inspired by a painting of two circus 'freaks', one of whom is identified as such only because she is black. The variety of subjects and perspectives displayed in the volume would later become hallmarks of Dove's work.
If Museum was the turning point in Dove's career, Thomas and Beulah (1986), for which she won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, was her crowning achievement as a poet and is probably her best-known text. The collection is based loosely on the lives of Dove's grandparents. Set in her hometown of Akron from 1919 to 1968, it is divided into two sections: the first, 'Mandolin', is narrated by Thomas, and the second half, 'Canary in Bloom', by his wife, Beulah. Some of the poems in 'Mandolin' were included in a chapbook by the same name that Dove had published in 1982.
Through the eyes of Henry and Beulah, the reader experiences a sense of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. At the same time, however, the collection references historical events emphasising the experiences that all Americans have in common, from the Great Depression and the Second World War to the John F. Kennedy assassination. In an interview with poet and critic Steven Schneider, Dove described her awareness that in writing this collection, 'I had written something larger than myself, larger than what I had hoped for it to be' (Iowa Review, 19, no. 3; Fall 1989).
In the same year that she published Thomas and Beulah, Dove was selected by Robert Penn Warren as the recipient of the prestigious Lavan Younger Poets Award. She followed up her award-winning volume with the chapbook The Other Side of the House in 1988. A fourth full-length collection, Grace Notes, followed a year later. Reviewing the latter collection, Bonnie Costello wrote, 'All the features we have grown to appreciate in this poet arise here in their finest form: descriptive precision, tonal control, metaphoric reach within uncompromising realism' (Callaloo, 14, no. 2; Spring 1991).
It was six years before Dove published another volume. The long-awaited Mother Love (1995) explores motherhood from characteristically divergent perspectives. It is a cycle of poems that draws on a Greek myth, reinventing the mother-daughter relationships of Demeter and Persephone. Writer Suzanne Matson noted that in reading the collection, 'one is reminded anew not only of the capacious genius of the classical story, but of the vibrant dexterity and reach of one of our foremost and most valuable poets' (Harvard Review, 9; Fall 1995).
From the private mother-child bond, Dove moved to public history for her next volume, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). This collection, like many of her previous works, deftly blends public history and private experience, as does American Smooth: Poems (2004), in which Dove uses ballroom dancing as a metaphor for numerous aspects of life and art. A Shenandoah review (vol. 54, no. 3; 2004) described American Smooth as notable 'for its variety and its careful navigation amid the public and the private, contemplation and action, the politically edged and the openly ecstatic'. The New York Times included the volume in its 100 Notable Books of 2004.
Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play: Poems (2009) reflects Dove's continued interest in presenting different perspectives and her fondness for history. The book-length narrative poem is a fictionalised account of the life of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a black virtuoso violinist for whom Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a sonata. It was originally dedicated to Bridgetower, but after a quarrel between the two, Beethoven dedicated it instead to another violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer, and it became famous as the Kreutzer Sonata.
Dove has published poetry in journals such as Black Scholar, the Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Ars Poetica, Southwest Review, Boston Review and Georgia Review. Her work has been anthologised in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996; edited by Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay), I, Too, Sing America: Three Centuries of African-American Poetry (1998; edited by Catherine Clinton and Stephen Alcorn), The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999; edited by Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly), and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003; edited by Jahan Ramazani and Richard Ellmann), among others. Selected Poems (1993) brings together Dove's first three volumes of poetry in their entirety.
Dove is the author of a collection of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); and the play The Siberian Village: A Play in One Act as well as a longer drama, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994), which debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, in 1996. She also wrote the non-fiction book The Poet's Work (1995).
Long interested in music, Dove has provided the texts for musical works by composers Bruce Adolphe and Tania León, as well as for the song cycle Seven for Luck (with music by John Williams), which was first performed in 1998 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 2001 Thomas and Beulah was set to music by Amnon Wolman, premiering at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago.
In addition to her writing career, Dove has worked as a teacher of creative writing at a number of institutions of higher education. She served on the faculty of Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989 before accepting a position at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she is the Commonwealth Professor of English.
Dove has garnered numerous prestigious prizes throughout her career, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1983) and a National Humanities Medal (1996). In 1993 she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, becoming both the first African American and the youngest person ever appointed to the post. From 1999 to 2000 Dove served as Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position she shared with W.S. Merwin and Louise Glück. In 2004 she was appointed to a two-year term as the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2008 Dove was awarded the Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award; a Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal followed in 2009. She has also been awarded more than 20 honorary doctoral degrees in recognition of her literary achievements. She lives with her husband in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Dove's work has received widespread critical acclaim and is beloved by scholars and readers alike. In addition to having been widely and favourably reviewed, her work has given rise to a diverse body of academic criticism. This scholarship has treated a number of aspects of her work; however, certain prominent themes and perspectives continue to dominate these critical discussions.
Because Dove is an African-American woman, many scholars have been interested in how race plays out in her works. Poems such as 'The Transport of Slaves from Maryland to Mississippi' (about an escape from slavery thwarted by other slaves), 'Parsley' and Henry and Beulah have proved particularly rich sources for such criticism. For example, Helen Vendler's essay 'Rita Dove: Identity Markers' (Callaloo, 17, no. 2; Spring 1994) explores representations of blackness in Dove's work, tracing the poet's treatment of race from her earliest collection through Grace Notes. 'More than any other contemporary black poet,' Vendler writes, 'Dove has taken on the daunting aesthetic question of how to be faithful to, and yet unconstrained by, the presence -- always already given a black American -- of blackness.'
In her essay 'Rita Dove: Crossing Boundaries' (Callaloo, 14, no. 2; Spring 1991), Ekaterini Georgoudaki acknowledges that race is only one aspect of the many characters and experiences that Dove portrays. Georgoudaki notes that Dove 'speaks with the voice of a world citizen who places her personal, racial and national experience within the context of human experience as a whole, and celebrates its richness and community'. Therese Frey Steffen explores similar issues in her 2001 book Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama.
Like Georgoudaki and Steffen, numerous scholars have been drawn to Dove's ability to maintain multiple, divergent perspectives in her works. In his essay 'Lives in Motion: Multiple Perspectives in Rita Dove's Poetry', Kevin Stein offers close readings of poems such as 'Corduroy Road' and 'My Father's Telescope', analysing the 'careful balancing of opposites [. . . the] playfulness with history's multiple perspectives, [that] is characteristic of Dove's work' (Mississippi Review, 23, no. 3; Spring 1995). Malin Pereira's book Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism (2003) explores numerous aspects of Dove's poetry from The Yellow House on the Corner to Mother Love.
Dove provides insight into her career as a poet in several interviews, including those with Stan Sanvel Rubin and Earl G. Ingersoll (Black American Literature Forum, 20, no. 3; Autumn 1986), William Walsh (Kenyon Review, 16, no. 3; Summer 1994), and Steven Bellin (Mississippi Review, 23, no. 3; Spring 1995).
Word count: 2046 Copyright © 2010 ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved. |
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Rita Dove (1952- ), American poet, short-story writer and novelist, is known for her careful control of language and for works that manage to be both objective and personal, addressing social issues from a number of differing perspectives. Many of Dove's poems reflect her immense love of history as well as her interest in mythology and her knowledge of the Bible. Literary critic Arnold Rampersad described her as 'surely one of the three or four most gifted young black American poets to appear since LeRoi Jones [. . .] and perhaps the most disciplined and technically accomplished black poet to arrive since Gwendolyn Brooks' (Callaloo, 26; Winter 1986). In addition to Brooks, Dove is often likened to other great American poets such as Langston Hughes and Robert Frost.
Rita Frances Dove was born on 28 August 1952 in Akron, Ohio. Her parents, Ray and Elvira (Hord) Dove, were prominent members of their community. Her father was the first African-American chemist in Akron's tyre industry. Education was important to the Dove family, and Rita demonstrated an aptitude for learning at an early age. She loved to read and discovered poetry while exploring the wide variety of books at her local library. She later recalled that she began to write as early as the third grade, but did not realise that she could make a career out of her passion until she was in college. In 1970 Dove was recognised as one of the top 100 high school seniors in the country, an honour that came with a trip to the White House.
After high school Dove continued her education at Miami University of Ohio, where she was elected to the honour society Phi Beta Kappa, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in English in 1973. After studying briefly at Tübingen University in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, Dove honed her craft at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She completed an MFA in creative writing at Iowa in 1977. Two years later she married German novelist Fred Viebahn, with whom she has one daughter, Aviva.
After having some of her prose published in journals, Dove published two chapbooks of poetry: Ten Poems (1977) and The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980). Although the poems that compose these collections are generally considered to be immature works, scholars have noted in them the seeds of greatness yet to come.
Dove's first full-length collection, the autobiographical The Yellow House on the Corner, was published in 1980. It includes several poems from her 1980 chapbook and a number of new poems. Although reviews of the collection were mixed, even those who faulted the work noted Dove's unique poetic voice. One of the outstanding poems in this collection is 'Geometry'. In it a young girl studying geometry discovers the world in a new way, finding that 'the windows have hinged into butterflies, / sunlight glinting where they've intersected. / They are going to some point true and unproven'. Many critics have read the poem as a statement about poetic vision and the poetic process.
Dove's poetic breakthrough came in 1983 with the publication of her second book-length collection, Museum. Critics noted the maturation that was evident in this text when compared to her first full-length endeavour. Notable poems in this collection include 'Parsley', about the slaughter of thousands of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic in 1937, and 'Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove', inspired by a painting of two circus 'freaks', one of whom is identified as such only because she is black. The variety of subjects and perspectives displayed in the volume would later become hallmarks of Dove's work.
If Museum was the turning point in Dove's career, Thomas and Beulah (1986), for which she won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, was her crowning achievement as a poet and is probably her best-known text. The collection is based loosely on the lives of Dove's grandparents. Set in her hometown of Akron from 1919 to 1968, it is divided into two sections: the first, 'Mandolin', is narrated by Thomas, and the second half, 'Canary in Bloom', by his wife, Beulah. Some of the poems in 'Mandolin' were included in a chapbook by the same name that Dove had published in 1982.
Through the eyes of Henry and Beulah, the reader experiences a sense of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. At the same time, however, the collection references historical events emphasising the experiences that all Americans have in common, from the Great Depression and the Second World War to the John F. Kennedy assassination. In an interview with poet and critic Steven Schneider, Dove described her awareness that in writing this collection, 'I had written something larger than myself, larger than what I had hoped for it to be' (Iowa Review, 19, no. 3; Fall 1989).
In the same year that she published Thomas and Beulah, Dove was selected by Robert Penn Warren as the recipient of the prestigious Lavan Younger Poets Award. She followed up her award-winning volume with the chapbook The Other Side of the House in 1988. A fourth full-length collection, Grace Notes, followed a year later. Reviewing the latter collection, Bonnie Costello wrote, 'All the features we have grown to appreciate in this poet arise here in their finest form: descriptive precision, tonal control, metaphoric reach within uncompromising realism' (Callaloo, 14, no. 2; Spring 1991).
It was six years before Dove published another volume. The long-awaited Mother Love (1995) explores motherhood from characteristically divergent perspectives. It is a cycle of poems that draws on a Greek myth, reinventing the mother-daughter relationships of Demeter and Persephone. Writer Suzanne Matson noted that in reading the collection, 'one is reminded anew not only of the capacious genius of the classical story, but of the vibrant dexterity and reach of one of our foremost and most valuable poets' (Harvard Review, 9; Fall 1995).
From the private mother-child bond, Dove moved to public history for her next volume, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). This collection, like many of her previous works, deftly blends public history and private experience, as does American Smooth: Poems (2004), in which Dove uses ballroom dancing as a metaphor for numerous aspects of life and art. A Shenandoah review (vol. 54, no. 3; 2004) described American Smooth as notable 'for its variety and its careful navigation amid the public and the private, contemplation and action, the politically edged and the openly ecstatic'. The New York Times included the volume in its 100 Notable Books of 2004.
Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play: Poems (2009) reflects Dove's continued interest in presenting different perspectives and her fondness for history. The book-length narrative poem is a fictionalised account of the life of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a black virtuoso violinist for whom Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a sonata. It was originally dedicated to Bridgetower, but after a quarrel between the two, Beethoven dedicated it instead to another violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer, and it became famous as the Kreutzer Sonata.
Dove has published poetry in journals such as Black Scholar, the Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Ars Poetica, Southwest Review, Boston Review and Georgia Review. Her work has been anthologised in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996; edited by Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay), I, Too, Sing America: Three Centuries of African-American Poetry (1998; edited by Catherine Clinton and Stephen Alcorn), The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999; edited by Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly), and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003; edited by Jahan Ramazani and Richard Ellmann), among others. Selected Poems (1993) brings together Dove's first three volumes of poetry in their entirety.
Dove is the author of a collection of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); and the play The Siberian Village: A Play in One Act as well as a longer drama, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994), which debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, in 1996. She also wrote the non-fiction book The Poet's Work (1995).
Long interested in music, Dove has provided the texts for musical works by composers Bruce Adolphe and Tania León, as well as for the song cycle Seven for Luck (with music by John Williams), which was first performed in 1998 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 2001 Thomas and Beulah was set to music by Amnon Wolman, premiering at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago.
In addition to her writing career, Dove has worked as a teacher of creative writing at a number of institutions of higher education. She served on the faculty of Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989 before accepting a position at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she is the Commonwealth Professor of English.
Dove has garnered numerous prestigious prizes throughout her career, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1983) and a National Humanities Medal (1996). In 1993 she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, becoming both the first African American and the youngest person ever appointed to the post. From 1999 to 2000 Dove served as Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position she shared with W.S. Merwin and Louise Glück. In 2004 she was appointed to a two-year term as the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2008 Dove was awarded the Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award; a Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal followed in 2009. She has also been awarded more than 20 honorary doctoral degrees in recognition of her literary achievements. She lives with her husband in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Dove's work has received widespread critical acclaim and is beloved by scholars and readers alike. In addition to having been widely and favourably reviewed, her work has given rise to a diverse body of academic criticism. This scholarship has treated a number of aspects of her work; however, certain prominent themes and perspectives continue to dominate these critical discussions.
Because Dove is an African-American woman, many scholars have been interested in how race plays out in her works. Poems such as 'The Transport of Slaves from Maryland to Mississippi' (about an escape from slavery thwarted by other slaves), 'Parsley' and Henry and Beulah have proved particularly rich sources for such criticism. For example, Helen Vendler's essay 'Rita Dove: Identity Markers' (Callaloo, 17, no. 2; Spring 1994) explores representations of blackness in Dove's work, tracing the poet's treatment of race from her earliest collection through Grace Notes. 'More than any other contemporary black poet,' Vendler writes, 'Dove has taken on the daunting aesthetic question of how to be faithful to, and yet unconstrained by, the presence -- always already given a black American -- of blackness.'
In her essay 'Rita Dove: Crossing Boundaries' (Callaloo, 14, no. 2; Spring 1991), Ekaterini Georgoudaki acknowledges that race is only one aspect of the many characters and experiences that Dove portrays. Georgoudaki notes that Dove 'speaks with the voice of a world citizen who places her personal, racial and national experience within the context of human experience as a whole, and celebrates its richness and community'. Therese Frey Steffen explores similar issues in her 2001 book Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama.
Like Georgoudaki and Steffen, numerous scholars have been drawn to Dove's ability to maintain multiple, divergent perspectives in her works. In his essay 'Lives in Motion: Multiple Perspectives in Rita Dove's Poetry', Kevin Stein offers close readings of poems such as 'Corduroy Road' and 'My Father's Telescope', analysing the 'careful balancing of opposites [. . . the] playfulness with history's multiple perspectives, [that] is characteristic of Dove's work' (Mississippi Review, 23, no. 3; Spring 1995). Malin Pereira's book Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism (2003) explores numerous aspects of Dove's poetry from The Yellow House on the Corner to Mother Love.
Dove provides insight into her career as a poet in several interviews, including those with Stan Sanvel Rubin and Earl G. Ingersoll (Black American Literature Forum, 20, no. 3; Autumn 1986), William Walsh (Kenyon Review, 16, no. 3; Summer 1994), and Steven Bellin (Mississippi Review, 23, no. 3; Spring 1995).
Word count: 2046 Copyright © 2010 ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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