Interview with Rita Dove: Part 2

This interview was conducted on June 30, 2008, via phone between College Station, TX, and Rochester, NY.

ROWELL: I am convinced—and I have said as much in different public settings—that your example as a poet, and that of Yusef Komunyakaa, changed the directions of poetry writing in African American literary communities. What you did directed African American poetry away from the prescriptions of the dicta of advocates of the Black Arts Movement. I am fully aware that poets like Lucille Clifton, Jay Wright, Audre Lorde and Michael Harper—poets much older than you—were not writing Black Arts poetry. Your very first book, The Yellow House on the Corner, took us beyond what they were doing.

I am wondering, what were your responses to the poetry of the Black Arts Movement, to the poems of Amiri Baraka and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), for example? You obviously knew their work. In fact, “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, In a Dream” is one of your poems in your first book, which was published in 1980. Please use that poem (and any others you’d like) to talk about your response to the Black Arts Movement and what its advocates called the Black Aesthetic. Whatever you thought of the poets of that movement, they certainly don’t serve as models for you, the young new poet.

DOVE: I could spend a lifetime trying to figure out exactly what the Black Arts Movement meant to me. But let me back up a bit, autobiographically speaking—not to my days as a young artist but as a young girl. When I first read the poems of Nikki Giovanni, some-thing inside me woke up. When I first heard the Last Poets, I thought: Here’s a new voice declaring, “I exist. Look at me and see me.” True, it was a very loud voice [Laughter], but at the time that kind of brashness was necessary for the “establishment” to take notice. Exuberance percolated through my circle of friends, all of us ready to enter college and take on the world.

In the next few years, as I wrote more and more myself, I realized that the blighted urban world inhabited by the poems of the Black Arts Movement was not mine. I had grown up in Ohio—and though my parents started out together as lower-middle class, for most of my childhood and adolescence I enjoyed the gamut of middle class experience, in a comfy house with picket fences and rose bushes on a tree-lined street in West Akron, miles from the stench of the rubber factories on the working class east side where my father had been raised. I was a Girl Scout and a member of the National Honor Society; my high school was about 40% black, without major racial tensions (even now, our class reunions are multi-culti love fests!).

As an artist, then, I had a choice: to reject my world and appropriate a different one simply by writing as others expected of me, or to be true to myself. Certainly, timing played a crucial role in my artistic development, because by the time I started to write seriously, when I was eighteen or nineteen years old, the Black Arts Movement had gained momentum; notice had been taken. The time was ripe; all one had to do was walk up to the door they had been battering at and squeeze through the breech. So I don’t consider myself particularly brave or defiant: I was simply there at the right moment. The predominant powers had become less dismissive of African Americans, and the wider world was ready for nuance. I could develop artistically without undue outside pressure; and even though I’d get the occasional slap of the wrist because my poetry was, for some people, “not black enough”—hell, I’ve never understood what that means!—I didn’t have to fit into The Program. The Program had run its course and, after some political victories that served its purpose, stumbled into dead ends, artistically speaking.

ROWELL: So what are we to make...