![]() Jo Reed: Rita, you wanted to bring poetry, or you want to bring poetry, into everyday life. Jo Reed: First of all, Rita Dove, welcome and thank you so much. I spoke with Rita Dove in the late autumn from the studios at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Rita Dove has received far too many literary honors to mention, but here's a highlight reel: 22 honorary doctorates, the 1996 National Humanities Medal, the 3rd Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the 2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and, this week, the 2011 National Medal of Arts. She creates work that are equal parts lyricism, critique, and politics. Her subjects are wide-ranging- from Thomas and Beulah, a collection of poems loosely based on the lives of her maternal grandparents which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize to her most recent book "Sonata Mulattica," which tells the story of an African- European violin prodigy in the 1800s. Yet all her work combines her deep understanding of history with her gift of conveying complex emotions through rich yet precise poetic language. Since 1989 she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she holds the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English.īut first and foremost, there is the artistry of Rita's Dove own poetry. Poet Laureate, she was also the youngest when she was appointed back in 1993. She has also served as Consultant to the Library of Congress and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Rita Dove was not only the first African-American U. I'm your host, Josephine Reed.Ī brilliant poet as well as a committed advocate for the diversity and vitality of American poetry, Rita Dove has dedicated herself to building popular interest in poetry, to making it a part of people's daily lives. Welcome to Art Works, the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how art works. Jo Reed: That is poet and 2011 National Medal of Arts recipient, Rita Dove. To know that you're not alone in those kind of passions is one of the things that gave me such strength and so I feel like when I'm writing I am compelled to explore those intimate, very, very interior moments of humanity. So rather than rail against it, I felt that the thing that gave me such sustenance as a young person growing up and reading was to discover that other people thought like I did, that they had fears, that they also wanted to learn a strange language that had nothing to do with their race or their gender that kind of thing. It also comes from the fact that as a woman and as an African-American, I'm also aware of things which I consider quiet acts of courage on the personal level with friends and acquaintances that also will not make it into that mainstream. ![]() And so that memory and that legacy is all around me. They lived full and robust lives and did things which I considered courageous that no one will ever know about. Rita Dove: There were some incredible storytellers in my family and those storytellers again, for me, were people writ large. Transcript of conversation with Rita Dove ![]()
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