[Writer's Almanac biography - Garrison Keillor for American Public Media]
August 29 is the birthday of American poet Rita Dove, born in Akron, Ohio (1952). Her father was the first African-American chemist to work in the Unites States tire industry; he was a research chemist at Goodyear. Her mother loved to read and often quoted Shakespeare while cooking. Dove's parents encouraged their children to read widely and there were always a lot of books in the house. Dove remembers reading The Iliad when she was 10, calling it "an incredibly tense and interesting story." She wrote her first poem at the age of 10, too. It was an Easter poem titled "The Rabbit with the Droopy Ear." The last lines of the poem were, "Hip-hop hooray / Let's toast him a cup / For now both ears are hanging up."
Dove played cello growing up and was an excellent student, even traveling to the White House as a Presidential Scholar. A high school teacher took her to hear the poet John Ciardi and Dove was entranced. She said: "I didn't know writers could be real, live people, because I never knew any writers. Here was a living, breathing, walking, joking person, who wrote books." At Miami University, she took a lot of creative writing courses and gradually realized she was scheduling her life around writing. Things clicked when she read Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy." Dove says, "It was the first time I realized you didn't have to be polite."
She credits poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks as inspirations, but also James Wright, a fellow Ohioan. When asked if she considers herself an African-American poet, she answered, "I'm an African-American poet; I'm a woman poet; I'm an American poet. But I'm a poet first."
Dove writes often about historical events and people. Her subjects have included Persephone, Rosa Parks, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and George Bridgetower, a biracial violinist who collaborated with Beethoven. Dove came across Bridgetower while watching a film biography of Beethoven called Immortal Beloved. She was curious about the black violinist in one scene and began researching who it was. She discovered that George Bridgetower was violin prodigy in Europe, and good friends with Beethoven, who originally dedicated his "Kreutzer" Sonata to Bridgetower, who was the first one to play it in public. But they had a falling out over a woman, and Beethoven cut the dedication. Dove's collection Sonata Mulattica (2009) is an attempt to restore Bridgetower's legacy to history.
Dove's other books include The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), and Thomas and Beulah (1986), a novel in verse about the lives of her grandparents, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize (1987). Dove was the second African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also the youngest person to be poet laureate to the Library of Congress, a position she received at age 40.
Dove is a crossword fanatic and an avid ballroom dancer, competing nationally with her husband. She always travels with a notebook so she can write down interesting things. She says she writes best between midnight and six a.m., always using pencil and paper, and can work on seven poems at once. Each poem may take 30 to 40 drafts. On writing, she says: "Every time I sit down to write, I try to feel that I'm starting over. It's all new. It's all fresh, and I'm learning as we go."
No comments:
Post a Comment