Rita Dove

• Born: 28 August 1952
• Birthplace: Akron, Ohio
• Best Known As: U.S. Poet Laureate, 1993-95

Rita Dove was the youngest person and the first African-American ever named Poet Laureate of the United States. She held the position from 1993 to 1995. Dove was educated in Ohio, Germany and Iowa and first began teaching in the English department of the University of Arizona in 1981. In 1989 she took a faculty position with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and is currently a professor of English there. She published her first book of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner, in 1980, and in 1987 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Thomas and Beulah. She has won numerous awards, grants, fellowships and honorary degrees, and is one of the most celebrated poets of her generation. Dove has also published a collection of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985) and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), and collaborated with composer John Williams on a piece for the 1999 Steven Spielberg documentary The Unfinished Journey. Her other books include Museum (1983), Mother Love (1995) and American Smooth (2004).

Gwendolyn Brooks, who is also African-American, held the postion of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress -- the forerunner to the Poet Laureate position. Brooks served from 1985-86 and was the last to hold the position under its old name. Similarly, Robert Lowell was age 30, younger than Dove, when he was named as Consultant in Poetry in 1947.

Dove, Rita (b. 1952), poet, novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, educator, and U.S. poet laureate. Highly prolific and greatly appreciated poet Rita Dove was born on 28 August 1952 in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of Elvira Dove and Ray Dove, a chemist. She attended Miami University in Ohio, graduating summa cum laude in 1973. A Fulbright scholarship sent her during 1974–1975 to the University of Tübingen in West Germany. She received an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977. In Iowa she met her German husband, Fred Viebahn, a novelist with whom she has one child, a daughter named Aviva. That year she published the first of three chapbooks, Ten Poems. The following year she received the first of two literary awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (she received the second in 1989), and in 1980 at age twenty-seven she published both her second chapbook, The Only Dark Spot in the Sky, and her first book of poetry with a major press, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980).

Coming of age a decade after the peak of the Black Arts movement, Dove writes poetry remarkably different from that of the previous generation, which was loose and improvisational in style, with urgent and inspired lyrics. Indeed, Dove has been called the most disciplined and technically accomplished poet since Gwendolyn Brooks. Although her poems often focus on African American people, past and present, she finds many things of interest in them, not just their circumstances as racial subjects. She also extends her vision to include people of many backgrounds in order to investigate the complexities of perspective. In The Yellow House on the Corner, for example, she tells the story of how one enslaved woman thwarts the escape of a group of slaves when she helps the driver regain his horse. Rather than polarizing their positions, as the previous generation would have done, she illustrates their connection in the woman's recognition that she may be related to the driver. Her recognition and its result well represent one of the most profound horrors of slavery.

In 1981 Dove joined the faculty at the Arizona State University, Tempe. In 1982 she spent a year as a writer in residence at the Tuskegee Institute, publishing her third and final chapbook, Mandolin (1982). Her next volume, Museum (1983), was (as every subsequent volume would be) published by a major publishing house. Two years later she tried her hand at short stories, publishing the collection Fifth Sunday (1985). During her tenure at Arizona State Dove participated in the national literary scene in innumerable ways: as a literary advisory panel member of the National Endowment for the Arts (1984–1986); as the chair of the poetry grants panel for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985; and on the board of directors of the Associate Writing Programs (1985–1988), including serving as their president in 1986–1987. In 1987 she also began her long association as associate editor and commissioner, respectively, of two central institutions of African American culture, Callaloo, a journal of criticism and the arts known for publishing contemporary poetry, and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her literary efforts were recognized with many honors, including a fellowship from the Guggen-heim Foundation (1983–1984) and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets (1986). Her work during this period culminated in Thomas and Beulah (1986), for which she won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Loosely based on the lives of Dove's maternal grandparents, Thomas and Beulah is divided into two sequences, the first about Thomas and the second about Beulah. Although its subjects live together for decades, the poem sequences reveal lives that barely intersect, with the two more often moving in their own directions. More personal than Dove's previous work, this volume illustrates her ability to bring vitality and insight to the ordinary and everyday.

In 1988 Dove had a Bellagio residency sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, but she spent most of the year as a Mellon fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. That year and the year following she received honorary doctorates from Miami University and Knox College, respectively. In 1989 she published another volume of poems, Grace Notes, and accepted a faculty position at the University of Virginia, where she spent the next three years at the Center for Advanced Studies. In 1993 the University of Virginia promoted her to an endowed chair as the Commonwealth Professor of English. While writing she also remained active in national poetry competitions. In 1991 alone, she served as a judge for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; the Pulitzer Prize in poetry; the National Book Award poetry panel; and the Literary Lion of the New York Public Library. That same year she also was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame. Not content to stick to poetry, Dove extended her writing talents, publishing her first novel, Through the Ivory Tower (1992), and her first play, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994).

Through the Ivory Gate traces the life of a talented young African American woman, Virginia King, who becomes an artist in residence at a primary school in the town where she grew up—Akron, Ohio. Alternating between present moments and flashbacks, the story links Virginia's current life to powerful, sometimes painful recollections of her girlhood. The novel presents a series of shorter stories that through accretion build a sense of the richness of this woman's life and her connections not only to the friends and family around her, but to place, culture, and region.

1993 was a particularly big year for Rita Dove. Her list of accomplishments and awards extended even further, again illustrating her appeal to both African Americans and all Americans more generally. She published another volume of poetry, Selected Poems, received the Great American Artist Award from the NAACP, and became the youngest and first African American poet laureate. Dove read at the White House and spoke at the two-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the U.S. Capitol. Accolades in 1994 include the Renaissance Forum Award for Leadership in the Literary Arts from the Folger Shakespeare Library; the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement; the Carl Sandburg Award from the International Platform Association; and additional honorary doctorates from Tuskegee; University of Miami; Washington University; Case Western University; University of Akron; and in 1995 from Arizona State University; Boston College; and Dartmouth College. Recent publications include Mother Love (1995), The Poet's World (1995), and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999).

Bibliography

• Robert McDowell, “The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove,” Callaloo 9.1 (Winter 1986): 61–70.
• Arnold Rampersad, “The Poems of Rita Dove,” Callaloo 9.1 (Winter 1986): 52–60.
• Ekaterini Georgoudaki, “Rita Dove: Crossing Boundaries,” Callaloo 14.2 (Spring 1991): 419–433.
• Susan M. Trosky, ed., CA, New Revision Series, vol. 42, 1994, pp. 127–128.
• Helen Vendler, “Rita Dove: Identity Markers,” Callaloo 17.2 (Summer 1994): 381–398.
• Callaloo, 19 (1966)

Maggie Sale

Rita Frances Dove (born 1952) is a poet, writer, and educator. In 1993, she became the youngest to hold the title of poet laureate of the United States Library of Congress.

In announcing Rita Frances Dove's appointment, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, "I take much pleasure in announcing the selection of a younger poet of distinction and versatility. Having had a number of poet laureates who have accumulated multiple distinctions from lengthy and distinguished careers, we will be pleased to have an outstanding representative of a new and richly variegated generation of American poets. Rita Dove is an accomplished and already widely recognized poet in mid-career whose work gives special promise to explore and enrich contemporary American poetry."

Rita Frances Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, on August 28, 1952. She was the second of four children born to Ray Dove and Elvira Elizabeth (Hord) Dove. Her father was one of ten children and was the first in his family to go to college, earning a master's degree in chemistry. At the time of her birth however, her father was working as an elevator operator for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company because he could not get hired as a research scientist. Eventually, her father broke the color barrier and became the first African American chemist to work for Goodyear.

From a young age, she wrote plays and stories which her classmates performed. In high school she wrote a comic book along with her older brother which featured characters named Jet Boy and Jet Girl who could fly and communicate telepathically. "One of the things that fascinated me when I was growing up was the way language was put together, and how words could lead you into a new place," she told Mohammed B. Taleb-Khyar in a 1991 interview for Callaloo. "I think one reason I became primarily a poet rather than a fiction writer is that though I am interested in stories, I am profoundly fascinated by the ways in which language can change your perceptions."

She was named a presidential scholar in 1970, when she was designated one of the hundred best high school graduates in the nation. A few months later, she enrolled at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, as an English major. A writers' conference she attended with one of her high school English teachers had shown her that writing could be a career. She also took many German language courses and practiced the cello consistently. She decided to become a professional poet while in college and told her parents while on a Thanksgiving break. "[My father] swallowed once," she said, recalling that day, "and said 'Well, I've never understood poetry, so don't be upset if I don't read it."' Faculty members at Miami University were more surprised than her family with her career decision. She said that, "declaring one's intention to be a poet was analogous to putting on a dunce cap," and that many at the school treated her as if she was "throwing away [her] education."

She graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in 1973 and was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Tubingen, Germany from 1974 to 1975. In Germany, she studied expressionist drama and the works of twentieth-century German lyric poets Ranier Maria Rilke and Paul Celan. Her political awareness "increased dramatically" while she was in Germany because she found herself "on display in a strange environment where some people pointed with fingers at [her] and others pitied [her] as a symbol for centuries of brutality and injustice against blacks." It was also in Germany that she met her future husband, Fred Viebahn, a novelist. They married in 1979 and have a daughter, Aviva Chantal, who was born in 1983.

Early Career

After returning from Europe, she enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she was a teaching/writing fellow in the Writer's Workshop. She received her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa in 1977, the year Ten Poems, her first chapbook of verse was published. In 1980, her second chapbook, The Only Dark Spot in the Sky, was published. Her first book-length poetry collection, based on her master's thesis, The Yellow House on the Corner, was published in 1980.

Dove's second poetry collection, Museum, was published in 1983 and based on her travels abroad from 1979 to 1981. In 1981, Dove joined the faculty of Arizona State University at Tempe as an assistant professor. She was the only African American out of a staff of over seventy members in the English Department. After being promoted to a full professor for the last two years of her stay at Arizona State University, she accepted a position as a professor of English at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1989. In 1992, the university named her Commonwealth Professor of English.

Poet Laureate

The United States Congress created the position of poet laureate in 1985, when it upgraded the half-century-old office of poetry consultant at the Library of Congress. The official title for the position is "Library of Congress Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry" and offers a $35,000 stipend for the one year term.

On October 1, 1993, Dove became the nation's seventh poet laureate by succeeding Mona Van Duyn. In 1993, she gave the first official poetry reading at the White House in more than a dozen years. In her role of poet laureate, she aimed to keep poetry in the public eye and to expose the mass of American society to a form of language that it might not see otherwise. She tried to be "a force" for poetry and revitalize "serious literature." She said that otherwise the country would "drown in the brutalization of a truncated, dehumanized language." Displaying her entrepreneurial energies, she said that she hoped to raise funds for readings of poetry linked with jazz; a conference among scientists, artists, and writers; and "town meetings" focused on poetry. "I'm hoping that by the end [of my tenure], people will think of a poet laureate as someone who's out there with her sleeves rolled up, not sitting in an ivory tower looking out at the Potomac." She succeeded in this aim, and James H. Billington said that she had come up with "more ideas for elevating poetry in the nation's conscienceness than there is time to carry out in one year." To this aim, he offered, and she accepted his February 1994 invitation to serve another one-year term until late-1994.

After her term finished, she went back to teaching at the University of Virginia and keeps a tireless schedule of public appearances around the country to promote poetry and literature. For the occasion of the Olympiad in Atlanta, Georgia over the summer of 1996, Dove's works were scored for Andrew Young and read at the games.

Honors

She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she served as writer-in-residence at Tuskegee Institute as a Portia Pittman fellow. Robert Penn Warren, while poet laureate himself, the first to hold that designation, selected Dove for the Lavan Younger Poet Award bestowed by the Academy of American Poets. She was president of the Associated Writing Programs, made up of persons teaching creative writing in colleges and universities. She holds honorary doctorates from Miami University and Knox College and was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1991.

Dove's activities ranged widely outside the world of academia. She served on the Advisory Board for Literature of the National Endowment for the Arts, was a judge for the Walt Whitman Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the $75,000 Ruth Lilly Prize, described as "the largest poetry prize in the United States." She held the Ohio Governor's Award in the Arts and the General Electric Foundation Award. She was also an editor of Callaloo. She was the Phi Beta Kappa poet at a Harvard University commencement an the New York Public Library selected her as a "Literary Lion."

Dove's poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, including Black Scholar and the Yale Review, and have been reprinted in such anthologies as Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now, edited by Marge Piercy (1987). She also published five books of poetry, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah, which won a Pulitzer Prize (1986), and Grace Notes (1989), and Mother Love (1995); as well as a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992).

Dove's sometimes intensely personal poetry displays her deeply informed grasp of literary technique. Helen Vendler, a leading critic and student of poetry, wrote in the New York Review of Books that "Dove has planed away unnecessary matters: pure shape, her poems exhibit the thrift that Yeats called the sign of a perfected manner."

Arnold Rampersad, director of African American Studies at Princeton University and a specialist in writing by African Americans, wrote that "Dove is perhaps the most disciplined and technically accomplished black poet to arrive since Gwendolyn Brooks began her remarkable career in the nineteen forties…." He spoke also of "the absence of strain in her voice, and the almost uncanny sense of peace and grace that infuses this wide-ranging poetry…."

Typical of her impressive grasp of classical prosody applied to a modern idiom is her spare free-verse sonnet "Flash Cards" from Grace Notes, which evokes childhood memories of studying with her father:

 In math I was the whiz kid, keeper of oranges and apples. What you don't understand, master, my father said; the faster I answered, the faster they came. I could see one bud on the teacher's geranium one clear bee sputtering at the wet pane. The tulip trees always dragged after heavy rain so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home. My father put up his feet after work and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln. After supper we drilled and I climbed the dark before sleep, before a thin voice hissed numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess. Ten, I kept saying, I'm only ten. 

"Horse and Tree," also from Grace Notes, catches a child's excitement about nature and carousels; "Stitches," from the same volume, tersely records the frightening tension during a moment of surgery.

Further Reading

For further biographical material on Dove, see the introductions to her books reported in the text. Articles relevant to her efforts to resuscitate poetry today are Louis Simpson's remarks in the New York Times Book Review (March 1, 1992), and essayist Joseph Epstein's essay "Who Killed Poetry?" in Commentary (August 1988).

Information on Dove's post-poet laureate career can be found in the Atlanta Constitution (July 22, 1996); the Christian Science Monitor (September 7, 1995); the Detroit News (April 18, 1996); and the New York Times (November 5, 1995).

poet; writer; educator

Personal Information

Born Rita Frances Dove, August 28, 1952, in Akron, Ohio; daughter of Ray (a chemist) and Elvira (Hord) Dove; married Fred Viebahn (a German-born novelist); children: Aviva Chantal Tamu Dove-Viebahn.
Education: Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1973; attended Tubingen University, West Germany, 1974-75; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1977.
Memberships: National Endowment for the Arts, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Phi Kappa Phi, PEN American Center.

Career

Arizona State University, Tempe, assistant professor, 1981-84, associate professor, 1984-87, professor of English, 1987-89; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, professor of English 1989-93, Commonwealth Professor of English, 1993--; United States Poet Laureate, 1993-95. Writer-in-residence at Tuskegee Institute, 1982. National Endowment for the Arts, member of literature panel, 1984-86, chair of poetry grants panel, 1985. Commissioner, Schomburg Center for the Preservation of Black Culture, New York Public Library, 1987-- Since 1987 commissioner, Schomburg Center for the Preservation of Black Culture, New York Public Library. Member of the Board of Directors, Associated Writing Programs, 1985-88 (president 1986-87), since 1991 member of the advisory board, North Carolina Writers' Network, and since 1994 member, Council of Scholars, Library of Congress. Final judge, Walt Whitman award, 1990; juror, Ruth Lilly prize, National Book award (poetry), 1991, Anisfield-Wolf Book awards, 1992, and Newman's Own/First Amendment award, PEN American Center, 1994.

Life's Work

Former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove was the third African American--and the youngest poet ever--to hold the post of distinction in her field at the U.S. Library of Congress. From 1937 to 1985, the position was called consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress; in 1986, the name of the consultancy was changed to that of poet laureate. Preceded in the position by black poets Robert Hayden (1976-78) and Gwendolyn Brooks (1985), Dove infused her role with an unprecedented measure of freshness, resolve, and vitality: she is committed to bringing poetry to the masses throughout the nation. "I think people should be shaken up a bit when they walk through life," she commented in Time. "They should stop for a moment and really look at ordinary things and catch their breath.... When a poem moves you, it moves you in a way that leaves you speechless."

Dove is generally held to be one of America's best contemporary verse writers and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987. Celebrated for sensitively revealing personal epiphanies and black American collective experiences, she has published several critically acclaimed books of verse since her late twenties, beginning with her first volume, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), followed by Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), and Grace Notes (1989). Her work has also appeared in chapbooks, magazines, and anthologies. A collection of selected poems from her first three books was published late in 1993, while a verse-drama is scheduled to come out in 1994.

In keeping with her interest in African American history, poems in the third part of The Yellow House on the Corner are written from the vantage point of American slaves. In the 1986 volume Thomas and Beulah, the black experience from the early 1900s on is revealed through the lives of Dove's maternal grandparents. Though Dove often writes about herself, her family, and black history in America, her works reflect a broad social awareness and deal with a variety of subjects. While she acknowledges her role as an African American poet, she does not like being restricted to that role. Her poems, she has said, are about people, and sometimes these people are black. However, she told the Washington Post, "I cannot run from, I won't run from any kind of truth."

Dove has handled fiction successfully as well, receiving praise for her collection of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), and novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992). Both of these works established her versatility as a writer. Aside from writing for publication, Dove has taught creative writing for many years. She is currently an English professor at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

Dove has always felt the need to excel in academic endeavors, perhaps as much because of her family's and peers' high standards as her own. She was born in Akron, Ohio, on August 28, 1952, to Ray Dove, the first African American chemist to enter the tire-and-rubber industry, and Elvira Hord, a high school honors student who passed on her love of learning to Dove and her three siblings. In her pursuit of scholarly excellence, Dove scored among the top one hundred high school seniors in the country and visited the White House as a "Presidential Scholar" in 1970. She went on to study at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, as a National Achievement Scholar, and graduated with honors in 1973. The year after that she attended Tubingen University in West Germany on a Fulbright scholarship. Later, Dove returned to the United States and pursued graduate studies in creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Though she changed her focus several times in college, Dove wound up majoring in English and writing poetry. While her parents supported her decision, her peers questioned it. "As a young black person in college I was expected to be a professional," she told the Chicago Tribune. "Writing poetry was unthinkable then. I was writing but not showing it to anyone yet because I couldn't see myself as a writer." But her parents and professors recognized her talent and encouraged her to keep writing.

After graduating from the University of Iowa with her M.F.A. in 1977, Dove began publishing poems and short stories, first in periodicals, later in chapbooks, and then in book form. She wrote for six to eight hours each day, every day of the week, for nine years, and supported herself with teaching fellowships at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and Alabama's Tuskegee University. In the late 1970s, she met and married German-born novelist Fred Viebahn, with whom she had a daughter, Aviva.

Dove's first full-length poetry book, The Yellow House, appeared in 1980. While some critics called the autobiographical quality of the book unoriginal and self-serving, others praised Dove for her melodious voice, the universal quality of her characters, and her allusions to the Old Testament. About one poem, "A Suite for Augustus," essayist Arnold Rampersad wrote in the African American journal Callaloo, "With deft wordplay, an excellent dramatic sense, and a sure ability to choose just the right fragment of experience and expose it to precisely the correct amount of light, Dove takes us--within the space of relatively few lines--on a historical tour of a sensibility." The suite's opening, "1963," refers to the death of President John F. Kennedy: "That winter I stopped loving the President / And loved his dying. He smiled / From his frame on the chifforobe / And watched as I reined in each day / Using buttons for rosary beads."

Museum, published in 1983, was Dove's most critically praised book before the appearance of Thomas and Beulah. In Museum, she writes about her own experiences and those of legendary historical and mythic figures in poems titled "Nestor's Bathtub," "Catherine of Alexandria," "Shakespeare Say," "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove," and "Parsley." Reviewers noted the work's maturity, Dove's skilled use of imagery and color, and the thoughtful, foreknowing quality of her voice.

In Callaloo, Rampersad described "Parsley" as "a chilling evocation of the madness that led General Trujillo allegedly to order the massacre of thousands of Haitian blacks in the Dominican Republic apparently because they could not pronounce the letter 'r' in perejil, the Spanish word for 'parsley.'" The first part of the poem, spoken by Haitians, reads: "There is a parrot imitating spring / in the palace, its feathers parsley green. / Out of the swamp the cane appears / To haunt us, and we cut it down. El General / searches for a word: he is all the world / there is. Like a parrot imitating spring, / we lie down screaming as rain punches through / and we come up green. We cannot speak an R--..."

Dove's award-winning collection, Thomas and Beulah, enhanced her reputation as a top lyric poet of her generation. Half of the book is told from the point of view of Thomas, born in 1900 in Wartrace, Tennessee, and the other half is from the perspective of Beulah, born in 1904 in Rockmart, Georgia. The book sprang from Dove's curiosity about her grandfather's move from the "Tennessee Ridge" to the North in 1919 with just a prayer and a mandolin. "I was after the essence of my grandparents' existence and their survival, not necessarily the facts of their survival," she told interviewer Steven Schneider in the Iowa Review.

Poet Emily Grosholz wrote in the Hudson Review, "In her wise and affectionate portrait Thomas and Beulah, Dove emphasizes their separateness by arranging the book in two halves, Thomas' story (vignettes from about 1920 to his death in 1963) followed by Beulah's in similar sequence. The ordering reveals how differently each perceived their union.... But [the book] is arresting not only as a study of character, but for the brilliance of Dove's style.... Dove can turn her poetic sights on just about anything and make the language shimmer." Similarly, Jack E. White commented in Time that "the effortless economy and exactness of the language she employs to distill the essence of life's small happenings [etches] gemlike verbal images that detonate a gentle shock of recognition" in her readers.

Having taken part in the black migration from the rural, southern United States to the industrial North, the poet's grandparents embody the spirit of their era. Dove told the Washington Post, "The poems are about industrialization, discrimination sometimes--and sometimes not--love and babies--everything. It's not a dramatic story--nothing absolutely tragic happened in my grandparents' [lives].... But I think these are the people who often are ignored and lost." As Peter Stitt put it in the Georgia Review, "The very absence of high drama may be what makes the poems so touching--these are ordinary people with ordinary struggles, successes, and failures."

In her fourth book of poems, Grace Notes, Dove again writes about personal things, such as nursing her daughter and recollecting her own childhood. The poems also deal with living in the moment, the mystery of life, and the relinquishing of facts for larger truths. In "Ars Poetica," Dove wrote, "What I want is this poem to be small, / a ghost town / on the larger map of wills. / Then you can pencil me in as a hawk: / a traveling x-marks-the-spot." About Grace Notes, S. Keith Graham wrote in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, "[Dove's] tone is sensitive, her style accessible and her imagery chiseled with spare power.... 'Grace Notes' presents the small but precious moments of illumination that can come to any of us in ordinary life." While A.L Nielsen commented in the Washington Post, "The poems of Grace Notes are largely autobiographical and abound in the unforgettable details of family character.... Rita Dove's Grace Notes are her turnings of the tunes we all hum, the tunes that pluck at our memories."

Dove's debut novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), centers on a gifted black woman named Virginia King, who returns home to Akron, Ohio, to serve as an artist-in-residence at a grammar school. While teaching puppetry, she relives memories of family life, a restrictive community, and her participation in a communal puppet theater. Reviewers praised Dove for her understanding of human character, her heartfelt emotions, and her effective discussion of the topic of race. Some, however, were disappointed with her failure to bring fresh insights into ordinary moments, something she does so well in her verse.

Novelist Francine Prose wrote in the Washington Post Book World, "Too often, Dove's novel recreates moments we feel we've experienced before ... and fails to take that extra step that might transform them into art." But Prose also observed, "Dove skillfully evokes the mood of a decade when social change seemed not only possible but imminent.... [She] has great affection for her characters and never patronizes or trivializes their hopes and fears and desires. There are no villains here, exactly, just the fallout from human frailty, human error, human misunderstanding. The daily tensions inherent in ordinary family life and magnified over time ... are touchingly and convincingly rendered."

Besides the works already mentioned, Dove has published two additional volumes of poetry: Mother Love (1995) and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999); as well as a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985).

Awards

Fulbright fellow, 1974-75; grants from National Endowment for the Arts, 1978, and Ohio Arts Council, 1979; International Working Period for Authors fellow for West Germany, 1980; Portia Pittman fellow at Tuskegee Institute from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1982; John Simon Guggenheim fellow, 1983; Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, Academy of American Poets, 1986; Pulitzer Prize in poetry, 1987, for Thomas and Beulah; General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, 1987; Bellagio (Italy) residency, Rockefeller Foundation, 1988; Ohio Governor's Award, 1988; Mellon fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 1988-89; Ohioana Award, 1991, for Grace Notes; Literary Lion citation, New York Public Libraries, 1991; inducted Ohio Hall of Fame, 1991; Women of the Year Award, Glamour Magazine, 1993; NAACP Great American Artist Award, 1993; Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa poetry award, 1993; Distinguished Achievement medal, Miami University Alumni Association, 1994; Renaissance Forum Award for leadership in the literary arts, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994; Carl Sandburg Award, International Platform Association, 1994; U.S. Poet Laureate, 1994-95; Heniz award in arts and humanities, 1996; Amy Lowell Fellowship, 1997; Shelley Memorial Award, 1997; honorary literary doctorates: Miami University, 1988, Knox College, 1989, Tuskegee University, 1994, University of Miami, 1994, Washington University, St. Louis, 1994, Case Western Reserve University, 1994, University of Akron, 1994, Arizona State University, 1995, Boston College, 1995, Dartmouth College, 1995, Spellman College, 1996, University of Pennsylvania, 1996, Notre Dame, 1997, Northeastern University, 1997, University of North Carolina, 1997.

Works

Selected Writings

• Poetry Ten Poems (chapbook), Penumbra, 1977.
• The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (chapbook), Porch Publications, 1980.
• The Yellow House on the Corner, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1980.
• Mandolin (chapbook), Ohio Review, 1982.
• Museum, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1983.
• Thomas and Beulah, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986.
• The Other Side of the House, photographs by Tamarra Kaida, Pyracantha Press, 1988.
• Grace Notes, Norton, 1989.
• Selected Poems, Vintage Books, 1993.
• The Darker Face of the Earth (verse drama), Story Line Press, 1994.
• Fiction Fifth Sunday (short stories), Callaloo Fiction Series, University Press of Kentucky, 1985.
• Through the Ivory Gate (novel), Pantheon Books, 1992, Vintage Contemporaries (paperback), 1993.
• Mother Love: Poems, Norton, 1995.
• On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems, Norton, 1999.
• Associate editor, Callaloo Journal of Afro-American Arts & Letters, 1986; advisory editor, Gettysburg Review, 1987, TriQuarterly, 1988--. Work published in anthologies and magazines, including Agni Review, Antaeus, Georgia Review, Nation, and Poetry.
• Selected poetry from Dove's first three collections, read by the author, was released on audiocassette by Random House AudioBooks in 1993.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 50, Gale, 1988, pp. 152-58.
• Contemporary Poets, St. James Press, 1991, pp. 237-238.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets Since World War II, Gale, 1992, pp. 47-51.
• Poetry Criticism, Volume 6, Gale, 1993, pp. 103-124.

Periodicals

• Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 19, 1989, sec. L, p. 8.
• Atlantic Monthly, July 1989, p. 61.
• Booklist, September 15, 1992, p. 122.
• Boston Globe, November 13, 1992.
• Callaloo, Winter 1986, pp. 52-60.
• Chicago Tribune, June 28, 1992.
• Christian Science Monitor, October 27, 1992, p. 13.
• Ebony, October 1987, p. 44.
• Emerge, July/August 1993, p. 12.
• Essence, October 1993, p. 52.
• Georgia Review, Winter 1986, pp. 1021-33.
• Hudson Review, Spring 1987, pp. 157-64.
• Iowa Review, Fall 1989, pp. 112-23.
• Library Journal, August 1992, p. 146.
• Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1991, sec. BR, p. 6.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 22, 1992.
• Ms., July/August 1992, p. 23.
• Nation, May 16, 1987, p. 654.
• Newsday, November 1, 1992; June 1, 1993, part 2, pp. 43, 53.
• New York Review of Books, October 23, 1986, p. 47.
• New York Times, November 12, 1989, sec. 7, p. 11; May 19, 1993, pp. C15, C18.
• New York Times Book Review, October 11, 1992, p. 11.
• People, May 31, 1993, p. 92.
• Publishers Weekly, July 28, 1989, p. 212; August 3, 1992, p. 68.
• Time, October 18, 1993, pp. 88-89.
• Washington Post, April 17, 1987; April 8, 1990, sec. WBK, p. 4.
• Washington Post Book World, October 11, 1992, p. 5.
• Writer's Digest, December 1991, p. 12.
• Yale Review, Autumn 1988, p. 84.

— Alison Carb Sussman

For more information on Rita Frances Dove, visit Britannica.com.

Dove, Rita, 1952–, American poet, b. Akron, Ohio. Her first poetry collection, Ten Poems, was published in 1977. Her verse is at once concise, precise, and evocative. History as seen from an African-American perspective is perhaps her most important theme: the history of her country, as in the slavery poem sequence of The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), and the history of her own family, as in the Pulitzer Prize–winning volume Thomas and Beulah (1986), her grandparents' life story in verse. In her many collections, Dove also writes compellingly of mother-daughter relations, e.g., Mother Love (1995), everyday life, travel, and the aesthetic experience itself. From 1993 to 1995 she was U.S. poet laureate, the first African American to hold the post. An English professor at the Univ. of Virginia, Dove has also written short stories, a play, and a novel.

(b. 1952)

1980	The Yellow House on the Corner. Dove's first major collection is praised for its historical and personal vision. The African American was born in Akron, Ohio, and would be named American Poet Laureate in 1993.
1983	The Museum. The poet widens her focus in this powerful collection. An example is the poem "Parsley," describing the order of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo to have twenty thousand blacks killed because they could not pronounce the letter r in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.
1986	Thomas and Beulah. Composed of two sequences of poems in a novel-like structure, this book shifts between male and female viewpoints--those of a husband and wife based partly on the poet's grandparents. One of the main themes is how this couple shapes their private lives. This sensitive epic of family life, with its intimacies and solitude, established Dove's reputation and won her the Pulitzer Prize.
1989	Grace Notes. This collection continues the poet's autobiographical exploration of family and generational relationships. The speaker of the poems reflects Dove's position as a kind of mediator, performing the roles of mother and daughter, black woman and poet, while seeking the universal cord that ties them all together.
1992	Through the Ivory Gate. Dove's first novel is about a young African American woman frustrated by the restrictions of race. She is a brilliant student, musician, and actress who does not want to be bound by racial categories, but she finds she cannot ignore the demands of her community. Critics cite this novel as a good example of a new generation of African American writers, who attempt to go beyond the obsession with race found in earlier African American writing.
1994	The Darker Face of the Earth. Dove's first play, a verse drama, is a version of the Oedipus myth set during slavery, as the white wife of a plantation owner has a black son who is sold into slavery. He returns twenty years later for a fateful confrontation with his origins.
1995	Mother Love. The poet renders the myth of Demeter and Persephone in startlingly vivid and deeply personal terms. Critics admire the flexibility Dove shows in adapting the sonnet form to contemporary idiom, and overall the collection wins high marks for its unity and character.
1999	On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Dove's seventh collection contains the sequence "Cameos," a narrative portrait of a working-class family. The title work celebrates Rosa Parks's heroism in the Jim Crow South, in which "Doing nothing was the doing."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)