Rita Dove, U.S. Poet Laureate (1993–1995), transformed the role by hosting public readings and responding to letters—many from people who fell in love with poetry after encountering its beauty as children. Born in Akron, Ohio, she discovered poetry at 10 through an anthology, later winning the Pulitzer for Thomas and Beulah (1987), a work about ordinary Black grandparents that defied expectations. Her career began after meeting John Ciardi in high school and studying at Iowa Writers Workshop, where she married novelist Fred Viebahn; they lived in Germany before she joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1997. Multiple sclerosis now alters her writing process—dictation replaces longhand—but precision in language remains key. Poetry’s enduring power lies in its ability to articulate shared emotions, from inaugural performances like Maya Angelou’s to Amanda Gorman’s, echoing traditions like the African griot while adapting to modern media competition. [Automatically generated summary]
All Q&A programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our C-SPAN Now app.
America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
unidentified
Now from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate who has authored several collections of poetry, including her latest playlist for the apocalypse, Rita Dove.
For those who are watching, we are at the Library of Congress in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress.
And for those who may be wondering who this person is behind me and us, it's James Madison.
And you may be wondering why he's here.
Well, the answer is that it was his idea to have a library of Congress.
In 1783, under the Articles of Confederation, he said, why don't we have a library for the Congress?
And obviously, it didn't get anywhere at the time.
But eventually, in 1800, 17 years later, Congress finally got around to approving it.
Under the Constitution, John Adams signed the legislation authorizing $5,000 for the Library of Congress to buy about 700 books and three maps.
And so now, one of the three buildings that the Library of Congress is named after James Madison, we're in the Madison Building, and we're very honored to have a U.S. Poet Laureate with us, Poet Laureate as named by the Library of Congress, and that is Rita Dove.
It's not a subject I can honestly say I'm an expert in, so I'll ask some questions that may not seem so sophisticated to you, but please bear with me, okay?
This question was one that I posed when I was elected or selected as poet laureate.
I came here earlier in the year just to look at the poetry office and I asked two questions, which is, you know, what does a poet laureate do and what is my budget?
And I got a look of a little bit of confusion on both of those because the position had been up to that point mostly honorific and the most poets did not live close enough to Washington DC to be able to be in this amazing building.
Jefferson Building was where the poetry office is.
And also because I was younger and I thought that this was a signal that I should be active.
And I got a lot of letters from people immediately who told me what I should do.
Well, you know, one of the things I did, I realized that a lot of people would write in and say, that was the time people wrote letters, of course, 93, 95.
And they would write in, the first thing they'd say is, I don't know much about poetry, or I don't understand poetry.
And then would come that famous, you know, but I want, and then what would follow would be some kind of a description of their first experience with poetry.
And it was always the most beautiful language they used to describe to stumbling on a poem that they loved.
So I thought a lot of people were afraid of poetry and what I needed to do.
What attracted me to poetry, first of all, was reading.
And that was something that in my family was really encouraged.
My father was a research chemist.
My mother was a housewife.
But my mother would walk around the house quoting Shakespeare.
I didn't know it was Shakespeare.
I thought it was her.
I thought, you know, when she would say, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace, and so when she was tired, I thought, oh, that's normal language.
So I wasn't afraid of poetry.
And my father read lots of biographies.
He loved to read history and biographies.
So his idea of relaxing was to sit back with a big book.
And we were allowed to go to the library, the public library.
We were allowed to go there and take out anything we wanted.
So that's what got me interested in exploring everything.
And poetry is one of those things.
I read my first poems in an anthology and thought, this is the language that sings.
I think if you want to do it right, if you want to do it so that it changes not only your reader's life, but your life, then both of them are hard.
It's going to be hard.
It is true that with poetry, every single word, not only the words, but the silences and the commas and the hyphens and all that, that that really, really matters.
That's what I loved about it, actually, that I could use that to kind of orchestrate the language.
But with prose, and I've written prose as well, novel and plays, it's just a different kind of music, but it's still hard.
I'm so happy that I was astonished that I wasn't looking for it.
I didn't even know they were going to be announced.
It was my third book.
And I thought that this book was, it tells the story of my maternal grandparents, just ordinary human beings, African Americans growing up in this country.
And I thought, you know, that that certainly is not going to be quote-unquote prize material.
But the reasons why are not that poetry simply fell out of favor.
I think that as other media began to take, became available, I guess you could say, to everyone, from films, it was easy, you know, and affordable to go into the cinema, and then, you know, television.
As more methods of communication that bore the human voice came to par, it's just that poetry had to make room, you know.
You know, the thing is, it's funny because I just did a show at the Irish Art Center in New York where they did a version of Desert Island Poems, and they gave me five poems.
But I think that what I would ask for, if I only had one book, then I'd ask for the collected Shakespeare because everything is in there.
If I only had one.
And when I was growing up, that was the book that opened me up to all sorts of writing.
It was a used, my father must have gotten at a used bookstore, huge two-volume Shakespeare.
I looked at that thing, it was on the top shelf, I said, that's the biggest book in the house.
I want that book.
And so I took it down.
No one told me that I was about 11, 10 or 11.
No one told me you can't understand that.
So I entered it just like a child enters language.
You just figure it out and no one told me.
And so, and there were plays, poems, you know, everything was in there.
Well, let me ask you: in most areas of human endeavor, we have made a lot of progress since Shakespeare, but how come we haven't come up with any writer who is better than Shakespeare?
And do you think Shakespeare actually wrote this by himself, or did he have some friends to help him?
But, you know, also because poets were the original, I mean, you know, in African culture, you had the griot who then told the life of the community.
They were the one who put into words what the entire community was going through.
And so that still trickles down.
So when President Clinton asked my Angelou, or when Barack Obama asked Elizabeth Alexander to do the inaugural poem or Amanda Gorman for President Biden, that's really hearkening back to that feeling of, can you put in a few words what all of us are feeling right now?
No, you know, what was funny was that my brother and I, we were very close, you know, when we were younger, we were only two years apart, and we wrote comic books together.
And then from comic books, we graduated to radio plays.
This was our way of, you know, this was our way of having fun.
And no one said that we shouldn't do it.
In fact, my father put together a microphone so we could do our radio plays and they had to listen to them, our parents.
So somehow they weren't, they were not saying go out and be a poet, but they weren't saying that it's silly.
I changed my major so many times because I came in thinking, well, I have to be a doctor, a teacher, or a lawyer, because those were the things that I was supposed to be to be a credit to my race.
I had taken all this in, not by someone sitting me down and saying, you have to do this, but it just came with the community, I knew.
So I went in.
I was a good student.
I just loved books and I loved to read.
So I didn't know what I wanted to do.
I first started, I think, in law.
That would have been a disaster, David.
It would have really been a disaster.
But then I went to psychology and I ended up in English because I could tell everyone in my hometown that I was pre-law because English was considered pre-law.
And so I was still on the track.
But inside, I didn't know what I wanted to do until I hit those creative writing classes and I thought, you can get a job teaching this.
And even though I was very shy, I loved books and the idea of being able to talk about books.
There were lots of German immigrants who had come to northeastern Ohio pre-Second World War, but there were also, so I grew up in grade school, we would sing these German songs.
We also sang French songs.
A lot of times they were wives who came in and said, we want to help in school.
So I knew I had the language in my ear.
My father, when he went to the Second World War, didn't know where he was going to be deployed, you know, Italy or Germany, so he decided to teach himself those two languages.
And so there were some Italian books on the shelf, and there was a German poetry book on the shelf by Schiller, and I could not read this book, but it was a beautiful book, handmade book.
And so I think in my head, I wanted to learn German.
I loved my time in Germany because I also learned a lot about the way the rest of the world looked at the United States.
And I also understood a little bit more about my own language because I was, you know, learning, I knew German, but really understanding how grammar worked.
And as part of the International Writing Program, and this was another program there at the university where they invited writers from all over the world to come and to spend a semester and to give a lecture.
I wanted to keep up my German.
I volunteered to translate the lecture of whoever this German novelist was, and there he was.
Well, you know, I never thought I would live in the South, though people kept assuring me that Virginia is Virginia and not the South.
Okay.
But there was a wonderful magazine, their journal about African and Afro-American art and literature called Kalaloo.
And I knew the editor, and he was tasked with trying to recruit me because there were other people.
This was right after the poets are and I had all these schools wanting me to come and I just wanted to write, you know, leave me alone, I can't move right now.
But when I came to Virginia to look at the school, I just, there were so many wonderful minds there.
And it also seemed to radiate, here we have Madison, but Virginia, University of Virginia, we have Jefferson.
And Jefferson stands kind of as a symbol of what democracy struggles with and with every day, you know, the split nature of our democracy.
And I thought, this is a place where I can really write something that reverberates throughout the country.
Let's talk about the writing of poetry, which is what you do.
You've done a lot of it.
You've done other things as well.
But when you write, when I have to write something, I'm writing in prose, and I don't like what I'm writing.
I tear it up and throw it away and start all over again.
A poet, I assume, does the same because every single word has to be exactly right.
With prose, you can make, you know, one word doesn't make that much difference all the time.
In poetry, do you ever have a situation where you're tearing up what you're starting with and starting all over again, or you just write without scratching anything out and just keep writing without any erasing or anything?
Now, when you write a book in prose, you usually have an editor, and the editor tells you what you did wrong and why it's going to be better this way or that way.
But I don't know, with a poet, can an editor really edit poetry?
Because you can't really say you don't have the right word or something.
Does somebody really edit your poetry or nobody does that?
But I think that a lot of poems, people think that poems rhyme because in a certain way, whether they rhyme musically or not, the words rhyme in the sense that they click or they come together.
And I think that very often when people are introduced to poetry at a young age, you are introduced to poems that rhyme.
Children get rhyming poetry books.
It's a way of memorizing it, but it's also a way of attuning our ears to the music of the language.
It's a form of poetry, but it's also a different art form.
It sounds like I'm hedging here.
But there are amazing songwriters who are also poets.
I mean, I think of, and I think of songs which are poems like Strange Fruit, for instance, Billie Holiday or Anything by Nina Simone or Leonard Cohen or Hosier.
Yeah, well, the first thing I would ask of them or ask them is, do you read?
Do you love poetry?
Not just do you have a story to tell, but can you hear other people's stories as well?
And if they don't, or they haven't that skill set yet, and I say, read, everything, read everything, find out what makes you, you know, what makes you thrill.
And that's the first thing they do.
When they do that, then the proper humility might have set in, but also a kind of attuning to the fact that the way to tell a story as a poet, or the way to convey an emotion as a poet, is also to engage the entire body.
So that means, how is your mouth forming when you say a word?
Do you choose a word like bleak or do you choose a word like dreary?
They do something different.
And part of that is the sound of it.
Part of it is the way it comes into your mouth.
So if you read and you read sometimes to yourself or aloud, you get that feeling.
So would you recommend this as a career to people or would you say have a fallback because you might not be great as a poet and it's hard to make a living as a poet, I assume.
So do you think that that situation helped propel you forward to some way because you wanted to prove you were so much better than some other people might have thought because they didn't take you seriously, or you don't think that had anything to do with your success?
Well, I do think that it had something to do, certainly had a lot to do with my sensitivity because I realized that inside of me there were all of these worlds and all of these thoughts and interior, you know, emotions that I had not seen expressed in poetry or, you know, even in fiction very often.
And I kept thinking, there is this, I am more than, how do I say this?
I guess I could say that I am an entire human being.
Look at me, see me.
And so something like Ralph Ellison's a visible man really struck me.
It wasn't that I wanted to prove that I was better.
I wanted people to hear me and to know that I acknowledge me and to see me truly.
And the way to do that for me was to write poetry because I loved it so much.
This is kind of interesting because, I mean, it's true, I grew up in a community which was changing.
In Akron, Ohio at that time, this is northeastern Ohio, there was a lot of white flight going on in the neighborhoods.
We were the second African-American family to move into a neighborhood when I was eight, nine, and by the time I graduated from high school, it was entirely black, that kind of thing.
But it was all for it was in flux.
It was in flux.
And then in high school, you know, I went in, when I went to high school, first 30% black.
When I left, 70%.
You know, that kind of thing.
But what happened was, I think I lived in a very charmed moment where I had white friends and black friends, and we all just kind of, we were just going with the tide.
My husband, who is German, when I first met Fred, I was struck by the fact that he did not feel guilty.
He didn't come with this feeling of, oh, oh, you know, you're black, and I'm white, what am I going to do?
It was, he looked, he saw me.
He saw me, I saw him.
And because of that, I think that we had less of a difficult time, though there were moments and there were times when our tires were almost slashed and when things, but we saw each other, we had each other.
We had each other's back.
My family was great.
His family was great.
I was totally surprised.
We got to Germany and there they all were, you know, ready, ready with flowers and ready to, you know, to meet this woman.
You ever one of your friends from high school or college who said, I always knew you were going to be successful, even though they didn't treat you that way when you were in college or high school?
It would be really kind of disingenuous of me to say, you know, I don't want any more awards.
I mean, come on.
But I think that part of it was, for me, it's a feeling of pride because I'm saying that, look, women and black women can also, you know, will get these awards.
We deserve it.
You know, let's have it out there.
So part of it is that pride in wanting to do my parents proud, to do my community proud.
And so that's part of it.
What happens, however, with certain awards, like honorary doctors, are wonderful, but they take time to the end of your life.
Yeah, and also if you have to do the commencement speech, that takes a lot of time.
And I want to say something good, but at the same time, I'd rather be writing a poem.
Well, you know, there have been, there have been some who have gotten the Nobel Prize, actually quite a few more in recent years, I'd say in the last 20 years or so, than before.
Part of that is translation, because if a poet is trying to do one perfect word after another, how do you do that in another language?
The translation is it really falls on the translator to do that.
So that's one of the reasons.
And the other reason, I think, is simply that it's harder to convey the entire essence of a culture through that translation, you see?
Why do you think school children should read poetry?
Let's suppose you're in the grade school, you're in junior high school, you're high school, you're worried about getting into college, you're worried about SATs.
Why do you think poetry will help young children to be better people if they read poetry and understand poetry?
It really all begins with the words that we use and how we can use those words to touch somebody else's soul.
And you can be a lawyer, you better know how to use those words.
You can be, and I've talked with basketball players who say, well, you know, you just have to learn how to move from one position to the next and know the other person's there.
And that's all about the way in which language moves.
It just teaches you.
Even if you don't want to be a poet ever in your life, teaches you to hear nuance and to understand nuance.
So for people that aspire to be like you, all the things you've done, if somebody's watching and say, I want to be read a dove, I want to be a great writer, a great poet, what would you say they should do to prepare for it?
Is it be good in English if you're in America?
Is it to be a good student?
What are the skill set that you would tell somebody that they should get if they want to aspire to have a career like yours?
First of all, I would tell them not to aspire to have a career like mine, but to aspire to be the best damn poet they can be.
their poet, not me, but them.
And in other words, if you're thinking, I think if you're thinking, oh, as a young person, I want to become a poet lawyer, you're not going to make it.
Because that's not what you're doing as a poet.
I think as a poet, you're not thinking, oh, well, this will please everybody.
What you're doing is just trying to get the most troubling and conflicting things out and hope somebody else takes it in.
So somebody is watching and they're saying, okay, I think I can see why she's been successful, but I don't know if I really care about poetry that much.
What would be the most important message you would convey, let's say one paragraph to people watching about why poetry is important to humanity, to them, and why people should care about poetry?
I remember walking out on this balcony and looking out at the Capitol building and the statue on top is Lady Freedom, who had been taken down for cleaning.
She'd been up there for over 100 years.
And in that moment, this was right at the beginning before I became poet laureate, but was about to step into the office.
I went out there and I thought, she looks homeless.
And that's what inspired this poem, which then, a few months later, when they had the celebration for the laying of the cornerstone of the Capitol building, they asked me if I'd say a few words, and this is the poem that I read.
Lady Freedom Among Us.
Don't lower your eyes or stare straight ahead to where you think you ought to be going.
Don't mutter, oh no, not another one.
Get a job, fly a kite, go bury a bone.
With her old-fashioned sandals, with her leaden skirts, with her cheeks and whiskers and heaped-up trinkets, she has risen among us in blunt reproach.
She has fitted her hair under a hand-me-down cap and spruced it up with feathers and stars.
Slung over her shoulder, she bears the rainbowed layers of charity and murmurs, all of you, even the least of you, don't cross to the other side of the street.
Don't think another item to fit on a tourist's agenda.
Consider her drenched gaze, her shining brow.
She who has brought mercy back into the streets and will not retire politely to the potter's field.
Having assumed the thick skin of this town, its gritted exhaust, its sun scorch and blear, she rests in her weathered plumage, big-boned, resolute.
Don't think you can forget her.
Don't even try.
She's not going to budge.
No choice but to grant her space, crown her with sky, for she is one of the many, and she is each of us.
unidentified
Poet Rita Dove viewed artifacts from the Library of Congress's archive.
And two very important the beginning and the end of Lees of Grass.
So the notebook is one of his many little pocket notebooks that he had a habit of carrying as a journalist, but he also used them to write trial lines of poetry.
And these are the trial lines for crossing Brooklyn Ferry.
And as you know, he wrote three versions of his autobiography.
So the narrative was the first, so it was very instrumental in moving people in the abolition movement, both the United States and in Ireland.
And then he did My Bond, Digital My Freedom, and then the last one was The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which he did at the end of his life.
And what's special about this page is one of the things that he could do in this last version that he couldn't do before is tell the detailed story of how he escaped from slavery.
Because before the war, of course, he couldn't give away how they did it.
See more with Rita Dove and the Library of Congress's archive on America's Book Love, The Treasures, available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series.
Next Sunday with our guest Pulitzer Prize winner, Stacey Schiff, author of biographies, including Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams, and Cleopatra.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
I feel as if he is in always admirable in so many ways.
Just the essential DNA of America.
His voice is the voice of America, literally.
unidentified
Watch America's Book Club with Stacey Schiff next Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
Only on C-SPAN.
Nonfiction book lovers, C-SPAN has a number of podcasts for you.
Listen to best-selling non-fiction authors and influential interviewers on the Afterwords podcast and on Q ⁇ A. Hear wide-ranging conversations with the non-fiction authors and others who are making things happen.
And BookNotes Plus episodes are weekly hour-long conversations that regularly feature fascinating authors of non-fiction books on a wide variety of topics.
Find all of our podcasts by downloading the free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, c-span.org slash podcasts.
Up next, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer answering questions from members of the House of Commons.
In this final Prime Minister's question session of the year, he spoke on the mass shooting at a Hanukkah event in Australia, the UK's economy and inflation, and various domestic and foreign affairs issues.
Right, let us come to Prime Minister's questions, Melanie Ward.