Selected Poems
Academy of American Poets: Rita Dove
Modern American Poetry: Rita Dove
The Rita Dove Homepage

Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio, USA) is an African American United States poet and author. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995.

Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Miami University and her MFA from the University of Iowa. She also held a Fulbright Scholarship at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany. For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams's music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey.

Career

Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn. She received her undergraduate degree in English in 1973 from Miami University of Ohio. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1977. Her most famous work is Thomas and Beulah, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1986, a collection of poems based on the lives of her grandparents, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987. She taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989.

Dove served as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, most recently, the 2006 Common Wealth Award, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal.

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Poems:

My Father Enters the Work Force

The path to ABC Business School
was paid for by a lucky sign:
Alterations, Qualified Seamstress Inquire Within.
Tested on Sleeves, hers
never puckered -- puffed or sleek,
Leg o' or Raglan --
they barely needed the damp cloth
to steam them perfect.

Those were the afternoons. Evenings
she took in piecework, the treadle machine
with its locomotive whir
traveling the lit path of the needle
through quicksand taffeta
or velvet deep as a forest.
And now and now sang the treadle,
I know, I know....

And then it was day again, all morning
at the office machines, their clack and chatter
another journey -- rougher,
that would go on forever
until she could break a hundred words
with no errors -- ah, and then

no more postponed groceries,
and that blue pair of shoes!

Vacation

I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs—but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.

Wiring Home

Lest the wolves loose their whistles
and shopkeepers inquire,
keep moving, though your knees flush
red as two chapped apples,
keep moving, head up,
past the beggar's cold cup,
past the kiosk's
trumpet tales of
odyssey and heartbreak-
until, turning a corner, you stand,
staring: ambushed
by a window of canaries
bright as a thousand
golden narcissi.

Golden Oldie

I made it home early, only to get
stalled in the driveway-swaying
at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune
meant for more than two hands playing.
The words were easy, crooned
by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover
a pain majestic enough
to live by. I turned the air conditioning off,
leaned back to float on a film of sweat,
and listened to her sentiment:
Baby, where did our love go?-a lament
I greedily took in
without a clue who my lover
might be, or where to start looking.

Exit

Just when hope withers, the visa is granted.
The door opens to a street like in the movies,
clean of people, of cats; except it is your street
you are leaving. A visa has been granted,
"provisionally"-a fretful word.
The windows you have closed behind
you are turning pink, doing what they do
every dawn. Here it's gray. The door
to the taxicab waits. This suitcase,
the saddest object in the world.
Well, the world's open. And now through
the windshield the sky begins to blush
as you did when your mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.

Dusting

Every day a wilderness--no
shade in sight. Beulah
patient among knicknacks,
the solarium a rage
of light, a "rainstorm
as her gray cloth brings
dark wood to life.

Under her hand scrolls
and crests gleam
darker still. What
was his name, that
silly boy at the fair with
the rifle booth? And his kiss and
the clear bowl with one bright
fish, rippling
wound!

Not Michael--
something finer. Each dust
stroke a deep breath and
the canary in bloom.
Wavery memory: home
from a dance, the front door
blown open and the parlor
in snow, she rushed
the bowl to the stove, watched
as the locket of ice
dissolved and he
swam free.

That was years before
Father gave her up
with her name, years before
her name grew to mean
Promise, then
Desert-in-Peace.
Long before the shadow and
sun's accomplice, the tree.

Maurice.

Lady Freedom Among Us

don't lower your eyes

or stare straight ahead to where

you think you ought to be going

don't mutter oh no

not another one

get a job fly a kite

go bury a bone

with her oldfashioned sandals

with her leaden skirts

with her stained cheeks and whiskers and

heaped up trinkets

she has risen among us in blunt reproach

she has fitted her hair under a hand-me-down cap

and spruced it up with feathers and stars

slung over her shoulder she bears

the rainbowed layers of charity and murmurs

all of you even the least of you

don't cross to the other side of the square

don't think another item to fit on a

tourist's agenda

consider her drenched gaze her shining brow

she who has brought mercy back into the streets

and will not retire politely to the potter's field

having assumed the thick skin of this town

its gritted exhaust its sunscorch and blear

she rests in her weathered plumage

bigboned resolute

don't think you can ever forget her

don't even try

she's not going to budge

no choice but to grant her space

crown her with sky

for she is one of the many

and she is each of us

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