Okay. We’re finished, done. My head careens, heart flops. She clenches her teeth, whirls her back to me, says “Just go. Please? Will you just leave?” I think of my brother’s grave. Looking at her back: I don’t know why the grave’s what popped to mind. Where is it again? Oh yes. On Long Isle. Been a long time. Long time no see we used to say about other things, among other things. What it must look like now. Overgrown like my own head hair. “Then I’ll go then,” she says. Though it’s her house. Her small bright once rented recently bought old stone house. Her child’s inside. Her twelve year old girl and two year old cat. Her furniture and diverse work appurtenances. Her dog, car and garden in back. All I got inside is half a dresser drawer I share with her sheeting and on the washstand my razor and tooth-and shaving brush. Though the garden’s mine in the sense that I rended it from rubble and trash. And have been watering, weeding, singly though not exclusively tending it. Turnips. That’s only one of some twenty roots and legumes I’ve planted there. White radishes another. Two rows of each plant and all ripe for picking now. In fact I’ve picked plenty. Pickled plenty also, as nobody here but me likes them cooked in any of the many ways I’ve learned to prepare them or even sliced thin into salads or cut in half and concaved with a cheese dip in them on a plate of mayonaised carrot and parsnip sticks and other hors d’oeuvres. “Boooo, turnips and radishes,” Linetta usually says. “You and your roots picturesquely heaped up to us in a thousand awful ways,” Mary’s said. Mary’s left. She did say “Then I’ll go then.” But go from her own house? Temporarily she must have meant. But she’s nowhere in sight and I want her to hug me as I hug her and apologize. I think I know what I’ll say. I’ll blame my infantile egotistical outburst and attack on her on the book I’ve been reading which blames just about all of man’s infantile egotistical outbursts and attacks, genocide or any otherwise, on his almost constant repressive fear of death. “Em?” I call into the house.
Suggested Reading
Rouen’s Municipal Library, 1959–1964 (or, The Formative Years)
By Annie Ernaux“With a certain measure of pride, I felt myself becoming an ‘intellectual.’ ”
The Daily
First Person
The Art of Poetry No. 113
By Rita Dove
With her husband, Fred Viebahn, in Gummersbach, Germany, 1977. Courtesy of Rita Dove.
I first encountered Rita Dove in Essence magazine, where I learned that she’d won the 1987 Pulitzer for her book Thomas and Beulah (1986)—the first Black poet to be so awarded since Gwendolyn Brooks nearly four decades before. As a Black high schooler in Kansas who wrote poetry, or tried to, I distinctly remember wondering why no one had come to my door to inform me personally of this achievement—though I suppose the magazine, which then published poetry in its pages, had in fact done as much.
Thomas and Beulah was a revelation. Written in lines musical, freighted, and precise, Dove’s sequence of poems about her grandparents’ marriage is shadowed by the Great Migration, World War II, and the civil rights movement. That book’s grand theme—the intimacy of history—courses through Dove’s oeuvre, starting with her debut, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), and 1983’s Museum, a powerful collection that includes a poem called “Parsley,” which tells of the Dominican Republic leader Rafael Trujillo’s mass murder of Haitians on the pretext of “a single, beautiful word.” Dove’s ability to evoke a deadly dictator with irony and complexity is reminiscent of Milton’s sympathy for the devil in Paradise Lost or W. H. Auden’s damning “Epitaph on a Tyrant.”
Dove’s first four books of poetry appeared at three-year intervals, a pace that slowed only slightly with Mother Love (1995) and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). Both refract her experiences of parenthood—she and her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn, have a daughter, Aviva—and of serving as the United States poet laureate, a role she occupied from 1993 to 1995, and which she transformed from what was once simply called the consultant in poetry into the prominent position it is today. Those early volumes, intertwined much as Lucille Clifton’s are, add up to an everyday epic that tells of the ways that public history is created through private lives—especially Black ones, which is still a revolutionary idea. Along the way, Dove finds kin in a variety of figures: an unnamed “House Slave,” sideshow performers in Berlin, Billie Holiday and Hattie McDaniel, Persephone and Demeter, a trickster “Spring Cricket.” She has also written several proper epics, including the symphonic Sonata Mulattica (2009), about the violinist George Bridgetower, the original dedicatee of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and, in Dove’s reimagining, a nexus from which to examine music, memory, racism, and underappreciated talent. As she writes of Holiday: “If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”
In her poetry—and in her work as a playwright, novelist, short story writer, and editor—Dove considers what it means to be far from home as well as to feel at home. Her places are many: her native Akron, Ohio, but also Germany, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar and where Viebahn is from, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she’s taught for more than three decades. Our conversations, peppered with Dove’s knowing laughter, took place over three consecutive days, the first of them in the Library of Congress’s Poetry Room, which serves as the laureate’s office. It was a full-circle moment for Dove, who was that evening to receive the library’s 2022 lifetime achievement Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. At the ceremony, she read from the elegant, pointed poems in her most recent book, Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021), in which she first revealed having multiple sclerosis to her readers. Her sense of humor, never enough commented on, was in full force—as was her training both as an opera singer and, more recently, a ballroom dancer. Her carriage, as ever, was impeccable, her work woven through with jazz, with the pleasures and silences of language.
Given that she and her husband are both famous night owls who often work till dawn, our midday meetings, early for her, were particularly generous. We spent our next two days at the dining room table of her Charlottesville home, where, in 1998, a devastating fire destroyed many of her papers, which she had gathered in her attic with the intention of later placing in a university archive. It seems important to note that our discussion of memory and personal history took place in a town where Confederate monuments and violent racist marches have jeopardized our faith in the power of those very things.
From the Archive, Issue 243
Interview
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
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