The Power of Poetry
RITA DOVE SEES POETRY AS A MEANS OF CONNECTING PEOPLE AND CREATING COMMUNITY
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
FRED VIEBAHN
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING POET AND ESSAYIST RITA DOVE will be in conversation on September 22 at the WIT Festival with André Bernard, vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The talk, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” is also the title of her latest collection of poetry. This is not Dove’s first time in the Berkshires. She was at Tanglewood in July 2022 for “A Standing Witness,” a song-cycle collaboration between composer Richard Danielpour and the former U.S. Poet Laureate. The sweeping retrospective of U.S. history from 1968 was sung by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and accompanied by Music from Copland House. And in July 1998, John Williams conducted the BSO in the premiere of an orchestral song cycle composed by him, ‘’Seven for Luck,’’ with Cynthia Haymon as the soprano soloist. The account of a Black woman’s life consisted of seven settings of poems by Dove. We talked with Dove from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she was quietly working on her memoir that will include more of her poetry.
The University of Arizona Poetry Center published a story in which you talked about the process of collaborating with John Williams. It started with a discussion about what a cycle—poetry or music—was meant to do. Yes. It’s amazing how many points we agreed on. Music adds a dimension that the poet has to keep in mind as she creates, because the words she writes won’t exist only on paper. I really enjoyed my collaborations with John Williams and Richard Danielpour, where we started from the ground up. That kind of collaboration means both participants are giving and taking all the time. It informs the way I think of words and how they’re formed; how the sound of a word can influence how we feel. At the same time, I needed to make sure I wasn’t just coasting on the music. That’s been my particular challenge: How do I make this a poem that works on the page, that has depth, yet at the same time ensures that it’ll be comprehensible the first time it’s being sung? Working with composers stretches me.
How do you feel about the reception of Playlist for the Apocalypse? When I finished the book and gave it to my editor, she asked me: “Are you sure you want to call it Playlist for the Apocalypse? Because it sounds pretty dire.” I said, “I really do believe in this title, and I hope that a discerning reader will know that it’s not all negative. That it’s not a pronouncement, but a playlist.” An apocalypse is not always death, dying, and destruction; it’s also revelation. That complicated kind of narrative is what I hoped for, and, for a large part, I think I’ve gotten the right kind of reception. So that’s really good.
I’ve read that you seek pleasure out of what you create—even in the most darkest situations or writings. The word “pleasure” needs a bit of fine-tuning. A work of art can move you because of how it’s construct- ed—for example, the craft may allow you to witness something horrible because it is done in such a way that you can bear the horror even as you comprehend it. The ability to articulate that moment speaks to the resilience of humanity, the great versatility and variety of the human spirit. That’s the kind of pleasure that keeps us from going under, and why art is so necessary, especially now.
How has the way that you’ve thought about writing changed over the course of your career? That’s a great question. When I was very young, I believed that what I was writing was not only good but necessary. I still believe that, but I’ve seen a lot of the world since, and I’ve experienced how little poetry can do at times, despite the good it might often engender; it’s pretty much a crapshoot. It’s usually hard to predict what’s going to strike home. Nowadays, I’m much more conscious that people might be listening to me, which is a compliment but also a peril. I don’t want to write to please; I strive to write to illuminate. It has been my mission to write purely without thinking of others around me, but at the same time, write for the world. All of which is not something I really knew when I was younger.
Because your audience is so wide and vast and your name is so known, how has that affected your writing? I’m sure it has affected my writing, though I try not to let it influence me unduly. I try not to anticipate the effect of a poem on the reader. In fact, I’ve always tried to defy categorization. I did not want to be known as “the Black poet” or “the woman poet.” I am a voice. I’m a voice of the times but also hopefully an echo of times past, free to touch upon many different subjects because we are all fluid in that regard. We are not monolithic. So with each book, I try something different. Not subject-wise, but craft-wise, to keep from falling into overly comfortable tropes. Playlist, for instance, is much more personal than most of my other books. It contains considerably more poems where I stand up and say, “Look here: I’m in this poem. This is how I’m filtering the world.” To be that exposed is a major change.
You are also involved in a lot of different art forms: music, dance, theater. Are they somehow linked or connected to one another and inform the other? Absolutely. They’re all connected. In theater, you have at your disposal the whole physical body, plus you have language. What you don’t have are the characters’ thoughts. You don’t have easy access to the interior. People are walking around playacting realities and saying things that are supposed to be confessional, but you can’t trust anybody on stage when they’re talking. So how do you get the words that are going to be spoken to suggest what’s inside? Or: take music. Language has music. A poet, or for that matter any writer, by and large is working with a language everybody uses and thinks they know, but the artist has to tweak it, bend it so that we pick up the nuances, catch a glimmer of what’s underneath, hear what’s not quite said. All of the arts try to do that. Dance, for example, has no words, but uses the body and its movements for language. My husband and I do a lot of ballroom dancing, and one of my teachers said that when you extend your arm, the movement doesn’t end until that last fingertip goes out.
I recently spoke with Jane Smiley, and she was talking to me about her writing process and how, when she was a young girl, she used to eavesdrop on people. That grew into a sense of curiosity of observing whenever she’s taking a walk or doing whatever. The same thing with David Sedaris, who is big into notetaking—at the end of each day, he writes down everything he saw. What is your process? Well, I wish I could do it like David Sedaris! Just like Jane Smiley, I eavesdropped on everyone when I was a kid. I was an unremarkable-looking child, and I knew it, which was good, in a way. I was also very shy. If I stayed quiet, everyone forgot I was there, and I’d hear everything the adults were saying and how they were saying it to each other. And if I didn’t understand something, I stored it away for later. That’s something I still love to do. It’s harder now because people notice and pay attention to me, so I can’t eavesdrop easily. I write at night, often midnight to six. I write in fragments, because syntax is my crutch, so I try to subvert it. I have lots of notebooks; nowadays I also record notes on my phone, stuff like that. But they’re snatches, phrases like “lapidary universe” or describing the smell of rain in winter. I have tons of folders, sorted by color. If I’ve started a poem and don’t finish it that day, I paperclip all my drafts together and slip them into a folder—a process I leave up to intuition. If it feels like it belongs in the red folder, no reason necessary, in it goes. At that stage in my creative process, I avoid thinking in terms of theme or subject matter because to nail it down with definition is almost the antithesis of the way poetry works. When I come back to my desk the next night, I will go to whatever color feels right. Sometimes I have two or three folders out there, usually overlapping, doing their thing.
How do your poems compile into a book? It’s pretty much magic. As I said, I don’t compose singularly. I work on more than one poem at a time, the fragments growing and cohering. Occasionally I finish several poems at the same time—now, that’s a great feeling! As far as compiling a book goes, unless there’s a narrative thread or biographical outline like in Sonata Mulattica, I usually wait for the poems to acquire a certain density. That’s what happened with Playlist for the Apocalypse. I had many different and disparate groups of poems, but when the pandemic shut everything down and I had all this time at home, I spread the poems on the floor and told them: “Talk to me; talk to each other.” And they did. I began to discover and explore connections. They began to form families and groups, and then I recognized the arc.
It’s subconscious? More like a directed subconsciousness. At some point, it begins to cohere, though there are always moments of great despair. I think it was Robert Frost who said if you have 25 poems, then the 26th poem is the book itself. Once put together, the book has an arc, a trajectory.
Tell me about your obsession with the underside of history. Being an eavesdropper as a child, I heard ordinary people commenting upon and being affected by grand events that made the news. Some of those grand events had happened in the past, and I had studied them in school. As an African American, when confronted with these “official” histories, I would mutter to myself: “That’s not the way it really was.” So my fascination, or obsession as you call it, is actually another way of looking at what’s called reality. My hope is—and this is why I’m so excited to be coming to this festival—that by talking about these ordinary people and neglected moments in history, the narrative might be nudged to a more inclusive truth.
How has the German language informed your writing? I began to understand English grammar because of German. When I was going through school, I was never taught how to parse a sentence. I knew how to use language, but I didn’t know the underlying rules. Studying German arning a grammatical system that was much more regimented than English, but then I began to see correspondences between the two, all of which helped me when writing poems, because if you don’t know the rules, you won’t know why you’re twisting them or when it’s necessary to break them.
I also realized that every language has what I call its own “cage of sound,” and how you can adjust meaning while working within that sound carriage. German is infamous—I know Mark Twain has a great parody of it—for assembling extremely long sentences crammed with multilayered compound words that may have been composed on the spot, but every native German speaker seems to understand them. And if there’s something like a past participle lurking within this serpentine utterance, the finite verb is plucked out and stuck onto the end of the line. That means you just have to sit and hold all the pieces up in the air as the narrative takes shape like some kind of Lego castle, until the final block slides in—what better way for a poet to build an epiphany?
What was your understanding of U.S. Poet Laureate before you were named, and how did you change that? I thought of the U.S. Poet Laureate as an honorary position usually bestowed at the end or near the end of a poet’s life. I hadn’t suspected, had no warning, but when the call came, I understood that they were looking for a change. I was one of the youngest U.S. Poet Laureates, maybe the youngest at the time, the first African American, etcetera. After the news hit the newspapers and air waves, people from all walks of life would just write to me, and I began to realize how many people were out there whose love of poetry had been suffocated by fear—fear that they weren’t educated enough to understand a poem even though it had touched them because they’d been indoctrinated that there was only one correct interpretation to a poem and they had better get it right. I tried to change that narrative. Poetry is really for everyone and should be unencumbered by highbrow exclusivity. Instilling this became my mission when I was U.S. Poet Laureate.
You visited a lot of schools and connected with students. What did you discover? Sometimes the students were teaching me. I would start talking about poetry, and then a child, eight or nine years old, would say, “But can I put this in a poem?” And then they’d tell me something that happened to them on the way to school, and I’d realize that there are so many untold stories of value out there, and someone has to write them. Not necessarily me, because I’m not that nine-year-old, I’m not in their place and time and situation. So how do we make sure they get the education they need to write or paint or do whatever they want to do to express themselves? The expression of their lives is really up to them, but we have to help them acquire the tools to do that. I came away from those school visits realizing how incredibly lucky I’ve been to have had parents who loved to read, who cherished books. There were times, yes, when I was discriminated against in my childhood; it came with the package. But at the back of all that, I had these parents who believed in education. So many of those children I met when I visited schools were brilliant, they had the spark, but there was no one telling them what to do with it, and that was the key. I make a point of answering every letter public school kids write me. They are our future. That’s where our focus should be.
Why is poetry so important in our society? I do believe that reading poetry attunes you to the various ways in which words can be put together and shaded to suggest a certain worldview. Poetry reminds us viscerally how connected we are. We are not that different from one another, no matter our social status. If a poem pings and you think, I’ve felt that way—even though you don’t know the poet from Adam—that feeling of not being alone with your deepest, darkest emotional moments outweighs all the gold in the world. That’s community. That’s why poetry is important, and remains so.
WIT 2023: Changing The Narrative
September 21–23 Shakespeare & Company, Lenox
Thursday, September 21
5 p.m. Jane Smiley in conversation with Jennie Kassanoff • Politics and Prose
Friday, September 22
10:30 a.m. Margaret Verble in conversation with Morgan Talty • Who Are NDNs, Anyway? And Why Does It Matter?
1 p.m. Jonathan Taplin in conversation with Mary Rasenberger • The End of Reality: A.I., Crypto, and the Metaverse
3 p.m. Emma Straub in conversation with Maya Shanbhag Lang • Parents on Paper
5 p.m. Rita Dove in conversation with André Bernard • Playlist for the Apocalypse
Saturday, September 23
10:30 a.m. Michael Cunningham in conversation with Roxana Robinson • Mrs. Dalloway at 98
1 p.m. Isaac Fitzgerald in conversation with Saeed Jones • Memoir and Memory
3 p.m. Patrick Radden Keefe in conversation with Daniel Zalewski • The Cult of Secrecy
5 p.m. Martin Baron in conversation with Stacy Schiff • The Present, the Past, and the Historical Record
Free and open to the public! Registration is required.