from Understanding Rita Dove

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner, former poet laureate of the United States, is a writer who has always avoided categorization, opening doors between otherwise distinct artistic spaces. Indeed, one of the ways she comes to mind is in a doorway, securely in the old neighborhood, in family, in the local and specific. Yet she has, from the beginning, stepped through doorways, tested herself, and explored what is beyond as an international poet at home in symposia in Berlin, Brazil, Israel, and South Africa, a much-traveled cosmopolitan figure welcomed and admired in many countries.

As an American Poet, Dove has negotiated her artistic space with grace and determination. Like an athlete, she has seen herself as in for the long haul, not looking for supportive habitats in either black or feminist conclaves but shaking off parochialism by living and writing in Europe, connecting, in the volume Museum (1983), for example, the lives of black Americans, European medieval saints, colonial adventurers, and that of her own father. Museum was followed by Thomas and Beulah (1986), a poem sequence of considerable formal originality in which she inserted the particulars of her grandparents’ lives into American history. In Mother Love (1995), European classical mythology is fused with contemporary American culture. On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999) not only focuses on the achievement of ordinary women in the American civil rights movement but also, in “The Venus of Willendorf,” wittily links European artistic creative with ethnicity and sexuality.

These have been tough and intricate projects, but just as the title of her most recent volume, American Smooth (2004), refers to a form of ballroom dancing that permits individual improvisation and virtuosity, so the artistic execution has been fluent and accomplished. Dove is a major writer in the canon of American poetry, standing comparison with preceding established figures such as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, and Robert Lowell, as well as her contemporary, John Ashbery. It might seem surprising to link her most closely with Lowell and Ashbery, but she is like them in that her poetry is, in its entirety, a critique of American culture: like Lowell, she reveals history through the prism of the family; like Ashbery, fascinated by the materiality of the painted canvas, she accepts materialist culture as the medium of contemporary existence. Like both, she seeks new ways in which to express the autobiographical.