Rita Dove was born on August 28, 1952, in Akron, Ohio. She served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, making her the first African American to hold this position, from 1993 to 1995. She also became the first African American woman to be appointed as the Poet Laureate of the United States, a role she held from 1993 to 1995. Her collection Thomas and Beulah which was published in 1986 won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987. This collection is a deeply personal exploration of her grandparents’ lives, delving into their hardships and the experiences of African Americans during the early 20th century.
I think of Rita Dove as a portrait poet, a poet who without paint brushes, captures the essence of a subject, giving voice and character, also giving a probing uniqueness, a singularity to the person. In ‘Bellinda’s petition’, she wrote
To the honourable Senate and House
of Representatives of this Country,
new born: I am Belinda, an African,
since the age of twelve a Slave.
I will not take too much of your Time,
but to plead and place my pitiable Life
Unto the Fathers of this Nation […]
The voice is strong, defiant and at once compelling. She is asking to be heard and there is there a steadfastness that demands attention and a response. That is Rita Dove, the poet who is able to enter into the spirit, even the soul of her subject, to spread words like paint on a canvass, here light and there shadow, then the broad strokes and the gentle demure splashes of colour.
In ‘The Abduction’, Solomon Northup speaks with his violin in hand, of his abduction into slavery. Northup tells of his abduction with the signal temperament of a musician. He hears ‘The bells, the cannons, the houses black with crepe’ and ‘Brown’s tall hat collected pennies at the tent flap’ and we can hear the unmentioned jingle of the pennies and the wind flapping the tent flap. ‘Hamilton’s feet did a jig’ and ‘the pigs squealed’, everything singing to the musician in Northup’s heart. Again, this is Rita Dove’s gift, her genius, how to paint, knowing what colours and what palette suits her subject, and threading the words exactly like brushstrokes.
In ‘The Enactment’ Dove gives back her self-worth to Mary Ware. Most people wouldn’t recognise the name but it is counterpoised against another name that is well known but which is also unmentioned in the poem. So, this is a poem that rescues someone from obscurity, elevating the event to its emblematic status, without a single mention of the celebrated name:
Can’t use no teenager, especially
no poor black trash,
no matter what her parents do
to keep up a living. Can’t use
anyone without sense enough
to bite their tongue.
It’s gotta be a woman,
Someone of standing:
Preferably shy, preferably married.
And she’s got to know
when the moment’s right.
Stay polite, though her shoulder’s
aching, bus driver
the same one threw her off
twelve years before […]
Dove writes ‘someone of standing’ who of course is fed up of standing, and I am thinking the drive (pun intended) of the poem is aiming for the ‘she must sit there and not smile’. This is portraiture of a different kind. Can I call it a duet spread across time and space, leaning into our time, retelling a legendary story, but accompanied by the unknown other, Mary Ware, née Smith?
In ’Prose in a Small Space’, Dove sets out, very briefly her poetics and I love it: ‘Then it is poetry when it is confined? Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention […]’ There’s something about concision, something about shape and also about a seizure, and about space and missing words. It is how she finds the structure to make perfect portraiture, that I admire so much, without brushes.
Photos by Jan Oyebode
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