Interview with Rita Dove

CAMILLE DUNGY: First off, let's talk about your latest book, American Smooth. This book literally came out of the fire, in some ways.

RITA DOVE: In a sense, yes, it was the phoenix that rose from the ashes. We had a fire in 1998; lightning struck our house. Beyond the fact that it's the kind of tragedy you work your way out of, it also split the creative work. I identify my poems now as "before the fire" and "after the fire." I was about halfway through a book when the fire intervened; the manuscript took a different path, and the path that it took turned out to be American Smooth.

Because of the fire, my husband and I began ballroom dancing. After about a week of recovery, our neighbors came up to us and said, "It's time to get out of the ashes. We've bought tickets for a dinner dance this weekend, so Rita, buy a dress; Fred, get a tuxedo. Let's have fun." We went; and when we saw people dancing—really dancing, like in swooping across the floor—I said, "Oh, I've always wanted to do that." You know, there's a feeling of incredible freedom after such a big whammy, and you think, "I'm alive, and that's what matters; now I can do anything I want." The little things fall away. We simply said, "We're just going to dance and see what happens." So we did, and we 're still doing it.

The title refers a type of ballroom dancing—American smooth is the jazzier, American version of fox trots, tangos, and waltzes. When I first encountered the term, it seemed representative of so much that is quintessentially American. By "quintessentially American" I mean more African American, the way we kind of riff on things and make them our own. And that became the overlying metaphor for the entire book, the idea of taking whatever you're handed—whether it's history's ironies or a dance style—and making it your own.

DUNGY: You speak several different languages. You speak English, you speak German, you have an ability to pick up the nuances and intonations of the languages. You're also a musician, you play the viola de gamba and the cello. Now you speak the language of dance, which has its own technical terms and its own physical language. How has the language of dance influenced your poetry? Do you see it differently influencing your poetry than the music or the German has?

DOVE: Well, in some ways all of us have different languages that we move by, that we think by. It may be too soon for me to be able to answer that question as well as I'd like. I can say that dance has brought more physicality into my life—when you dance, you have to get up and move—but I also think it adds more body to the poems; they want to get up off the page and strut around. There's an energy in the new poems that's different from the energy that happened before.

I've always been intensely musical, and my poems have often reflected that musical impulse. First of all, let me say it straight out: I believe that if a poem doesn't sing, it has no business being a poem. Granted, each poem must have its own music, but it should sing that music without any kind of shame. During the course of my writing life I've heard and played many different musics—blues and jazz, call-and-response, symphonic and ensemble—and I think now my poems are actually getting up and walking around.

DUNGY: You've talked about poetry being a cage whose walls you were working against with the sonnets in Mother Love. Are you feeling with these new poems that there is a difference—that it's not the restriction of a cage?

DOVE: It's a different cage, but that's all right. Musicians can tell you they have cages within cages—there are measures...