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Jan. 19, 2026 00:00-01:02 - CSPAN
01:01:52
America's Book Club Rita Dove
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Shakespeare's Astonishing Poetry 00:15:11
We are here in the sanctuary of democracy.
Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies.
American democracy is bigger than any one person.
Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected.
We are still at our core a democracy.
This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.
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.
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.
Well, thank you all for coming.
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 at 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.
And Rita, thank you very much for being here.
It's a delight to be here.
So let's talk about poetry.
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?
No problem.
Tell me, what actually does the Poet Laureate of the United States do?
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 the 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.
And I just followed their suggestions.
And when one is selected to be the poet laureate of the United States, how long is that term?
The term is actually a year.
A year.
It's one year, but with the option to renew if they want you and if you want them.
So I did it for two.
You did it for two years?
Yes.
Okay, and what did you do as the poet laureate?
You made a lot of speeches about the poetry or about the Library of Congress or what?
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.
Let's talk about your experience with poetry.
When you were growing up, you were a young girl, you were growing up in Ohio, did you say, I want to be the poet laureate of the United States?
What attracted you to poetry?
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 was one of those things.
I read my first poems in an anthology and thought, this is a language that sings.
It's language that's singing.
And I fell in love with it then.
So you are a poet, but you're also a prose writer.
And you also are a professor.
You teach at the University of Virginia, and you teach writing and poetry as well.
I teach actually creative writing.
So I'm there teaching them or coaching them in writing poems.
So, you know, you really can't funnel it down.
Luckily, my students are, they want to be there because being a poet is not, you know, your kind of nine-to-five job.
So when somebody is writing poetry, it's very difficult.
I assume you've got to get all the words exactly right.
With prose, you can maybe change a word here or there.
It won't make that much difference.
In poetry, every word makes an enormous amount of difference.
What is harder to do, write poetry or write prose?
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.
So you've written about a dozen books on poetry, and one of those books won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Were you surprised that it won the Pulitzer Prize?
I was astonished.
I was astonished.
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.
And that's called Thomas and Mueller.
But was it semi-fictional?
Did you make up some of it?
Or was it all historical?
It is, you know, there's some truths and then there are some embellishments.
Let's just say they're embellishments.
No, I did change things.
And I changed them mostly, sometimes to protect people who are still living, but also because sometimes it just painted a more vivid picture.
So this is an interesting thing.
One of the things, for instance, when my grandfather was courting my grandmother, he bought her a scarf.
And that scarf was blue.
And I knew this.
But when I was starting to write the poem about courtship, I wanted the scarf to caress her neck.
I wanted it to kind of melt around her neck.
So I wanted to change it to yellow.
And I did.
My mother knew this.
My mother would sometimes tell me stories.
And she was perfectly fine with that.
She said, I asked her permission.
So let's talk about poetry generally.
When writing first came about in the Western world, a lot of it was in poetic form.
So the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, supposedly, I guess, if he really existed, was in poetic form.
Shakespeare wrote largely in poetic form.
John Milton wrote in poetic form.
Then there's in this century there's very famous poets like Robert Foss.
But it seems as an uninformed person about poetry that poetry was a bigger deal 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 1,000 years ago.
Is that true?
And if so, why is that?
You know, I think it is true.
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.
So I think that's what's happened.
So when you were beginning to write and you're beginning to write poetry, did your teachers say, well, look, poetry is not a big career future.
You should write prose.
Did they people tell you that or not?
Well, you see, I didn't even know that it was something that you could do and live with your life.
I thought that, and I was writing poetry from the age of 10, I guess, but it was always a secret thing.
It was a thing that I wrote and thought, okay, this is my secret.
It was my thing that I enjoyed.
I didn't realize that a little black girl could become a poet.
I had never met a living poet.
And then two things happened.
One was that I had an English teacher in high school who took about three of us from the class.
She asked permission if we could go to a book signing.
And she took us to a book signing by John Chardy, who had translated the Inferno by Dante, but was also a poet.
And here was a living human being with a book that he had written, you know, signing it.
I thought, my gosh.
And then the other thing was that when I was in college, I literally kind of fell into a creative writing class.
I was taking advanced composition.
The professor got ill.
They asked the fiction professor, fiction writer, to take over.
And he came in and said, we're going to write short stories.
And suddenly, I thought, you can take a creative writing class and get credits for it?
It was amazing.
So let's suppose you were on a desert island, you only had one book, and it was a poetry book.
What book would you want to have with you?
Who was your favorite poet?
Just one?
Well, we can have a couple books, but who were your favorite poets growing up and who are your favorite poets now?
Oh, but that's so hard to say.
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 it 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.
And he still remains a favorite.
Now, I can't really choose like favorite children.
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 was better than Shakespeare?
And do you think Shakespeare actually wrote this by himself or did he have some friends that helped him?
Well, I'll go backwards on that one and say that, you know, we don't know.
We don't know if Shakespeare had help, but I don't care.
You know, those plays are there, those sonnets are there.
And whoever wrote them, whoever poured their lives into them, they're really masterpieces.
With theater, everything gets, it's a collaborative thing.
When I was working on my play, I thought, my gosh, here's a community of writers.
We were in it together.
Now, when presidents are inaugurated, sometimes they like to add luster and, let's say, candlepower to what they're doing, so they have a poet speak.
And when John Kenny was being inaugurated, he had Robert Frost.
And I think Maya Angelou may have spoken under Barack Obama.
Is that right?
Or Clinton, actually.
Writers Workshop in Iowa 00:08:54
Was it Clinton?
Okay.
And then under Biden, Amanda Gorman, the young poet, spoke.
Why do you think politicians think that having a poet speak in front of them gives them more class?
First of all, because it does.
But, you know, also, I mean, 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?
Let's talk about your background for a moment before we go back to how do you write poetry.
So you grew up in Ohio.
Did you have siblings?
I did.
I have an older brother, a couple years older, and two younger sisters.
Are they any of them poets?
No, not a single one.
Did any of them tell you poetry was not a great career future?
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.
So you grew up in what city?
I grew up in Akron, Ohio.
And I remember from reading about your background, you wanted to stay in Ohio but get as far away from that city as possible.
So where did you go to college in Ohio?
I went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which is on the far western, southwestern corner, just a half an hour from Cincinnati.
And what did you study there?
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.
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.
So you graduated from college and then you decided to go overseas to Germany, a country I assume you had not been to before.
Never, no.
So how did you get a Fulbright scholarship to go to Germany?
Why did you pick Germany and what did you hope to learn there?
This was really a question of fate, too.
When I was growing up, I began to study German.
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.
And did you enjoy your time in Germany?
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.
Did you emerge learning how to speak German from that experience in Germany in one year?
Yeah, I did.
I mean, I knew how to read German.
I took German as my second language.
You had to have a language in order to get into college.
And I had a German professor in college who actually bugged me over the summer and said, you should apply for Fulbright.
And I'm like, what am I going to do in Germany?
And he said, well, you want to see the world, don't you?
He said, make something up?
You know?
So you came back, and what did you do when you came back?
Did you get a teaching job somewhere?
No, I came back actually.
I had applied to graduate schools before that.
So I had been accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop before I went to Germany and I got it deferred for a year.
So I came back to the cornfields.
All right, you went back to the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Right.
And you met a German there, and you married the German.
Yes, I did.
I married the German readers.
I married him.
He was Fred Feeban.
And he was a novelist.
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.
And you've been married now how many years?
Gosh.
I guess.
Over 42?
Something like that.
Something like that.
Okay.
So after you finished the Iowa Writers Workshop, what did you do?
Well, that's the question, because there weren't very many jobs in creative writing at that particular time.
And so, well, my husband, Fred, said, well, in Europe, you can work as a writer.
You can do radio reviews.
You can all sorts of things.
And so we went back to Germany for a couple of years.
Eventually you came back to the United States and you taught at Arizona State?
Yes, I did.
And your daughter now is teaching there as well?
Yes.
So you must like Arizona, your family.
Well, pure coincidence, because, you know, it's crazy.
She spent the first five years of her life in Arizona.
She's in visual and media studies, though it is in the English department.
But the job was there and off she went back.
For the last 25 years, though, you've been a professor at the University of Virginia, right?
Yes.
And what attracted you to the University of Virginia?
It's an excellent school, but I'm just curious what attracted you to it.
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.
Writing to Resonate 00:15:20
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.
Do students come to your class because they want to learn the art of writing or they want to learn the art of poetry or a combination of both?
They come to my classes.
They're specifically writers' workshops.
So they come to learn how to write poetry.
Of course, they also come and learn about poetry as well.
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?
That sounds like Mozart.
No, I'm not Mozart.
No, really, really, when I'm working, I have draft after draft.
I don't tear them up.
Do you start in the morning and write in the morning, or you write in the evening or afternoon?
I'm a night person.
I start at night.
Midnight is when I start.
You start writing at midnight?
Yes.
Wow.
The best for me in terms of my whole just bio rhythms.
If I'm writing at midnight and I write until the sun comes up, I'm happy as a bug, I tell you.
And it took me years to realize that because I thought, oh, you've got to do it according to rules.
You know, you sit up, and I wish I were a morning person, but I'm not.
So my image of a poet is that the poet is writing in longhand.
Do you write in longhand?
I used to write in longhand exclusively.
I wrote in longhand.
I have lots of notebooks which, you know, scribble in.
And then at some point, it graduates to the printed page.
But as soon as I would print it out, I would mess it up because I'm still working on it.
I'm still trying to get, as you said, the right words in the right order.
And so I keep going like that.
I don't do that as much anymore because I've been diagnosed, I have multiple sclerosis.
And one of the, I'm doing well and everything, but one of the problems that I developed was that if I try to write very quickly, my hand jerks.
So now I have to figure out how to do it.
It's a combination of dictation and just slowing down.
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 a 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?
That's interesting because I think that most poets have varying degrees of editor, you know, let's say, intrusion or not.
My editor for years was a wonderful woman at Norton, Carol Hook Smith, who came from the prose division, actually.
And she was great.
She was very hands-off.
She just let me do what I wanted to do, and only when the final manuscript was in, she might ask.
She would ask, you know, do you think that this poem is in the right place?
Delicate questions like that, which made me realize the poem didn't belong there at all.
And my editor, my editor now, Jill Bielowski is wonderful.
She's very, she's much more hands-on, but also very delicate.
She's also a writer.
She's a poet and a novelist.
So she understands how to ask those questions.
The real editor for me is the copy editor who comes in there and asks the questions of a layperson, like, this hyphen is not grammatically correct.
And then I get to argue why I want that hyphen, at least to myself.
If you have won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and you're the Poet Laureate of the United States, is somebody really going to edit your poetry?
And I mean, doesn't it take a lot of gumption to be able to say, I'm editing the poetry of the poet laureate of the United States?
What do you say to them?
You ever say, by the way, I'm the poet laureate and I've won a Pulitzer Prize.
You don't say that?
I don't say that, but I will say, I will say, you know, no, it's got to stay as it is.
And one of the biggest problems or things that I struggle with is exactly that, that no one will tell me if it works or not for them.
So that I tend to take a lot more time now before I show it to anyone.
I want to make sure it's really what I wanted.
My best editor is my husband, who is a prose writer, and who will come in there and look at it and say, I don't know about that, you know.
And then we have rules because we do look at each other's work, but our rule is that if given something to look at, we cannot respond for 24 hours.
Oh, really?
Yeah, you have to just.
That's how you stayed married for 40 some years.
So when he's writing something, do you ever edit his things and you say, he says, I don't know about that, or something like that?
I mean, do you ever say the same things to him that he says to you?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
So let's talk about what a poem is.
Some people would say a poem is something that rhymes, but it doesn't have to rhyme, of course, right?
Why do you think people think that poetry is something that always rhymes?
It's just, as children, you hear about poems and they rhyme, but as adults, most poems don't rhyme, right?
Well, you know, it depends.
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.
Now, do you regard songwriting as poetry?
Because many times the songs rhyme, but they don't have to.
Do you think that's a form of poetry or a different art form?
It's a form of poetry, but it also has a, but it's also a different art form.
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.
I mean, these are poems.
They have music as well.
Have you ever thought about writing songs?
It's probably more lucrative than writing poetry.
Have you ever thought about that?
No?
No, I mean, you know, I've written, I've done collaborations with composers.
But these are not song composers.
Well, with John Williams, we did a song cycle, but it was not something that you'd hear in the top 40.
Now, very often your poems have some musical element to them.
And is that because you're also very involved in music?
You're a ballroom dancer of some note.
Is that right?
You and your husband are ballroom dancers?
We are, and we do Argentine tango as well.
And I grew up playing the cello.
This was a time when they had music in the schools, right?
So you could just go, you know, at the age of 11 or so, you could go and pick out an instrument.
So I grew up with music.
I grew up with the music in the church.
I grew up with the music that was on the radio.
Music was always a part of my life.
And actually, when I was in college, I was trying to decide between becoming a music major or a poet.
Do you still play the cello?
I don't play the cello anymore.
I have a cello and I have a viola da gamba.
I take voice lessons.
I sing.
I have to have music.
And to me, poetry does sing.
It sings in some way.
It doesn't have to rhyme.
You ever met Yo-Yo Ma and said, look, I could have been you if I just practiced more?
Oh, goodness.
I've met Nu Yo Yo Ma, but I didn't dare say that to him.
So let me ask you, for somebody that wants to be a poet, not somebody's watching and says, look, I have some hidden talent.
My parents didn't really know it.
My classmates didn't know it.
But I really, my inner circle says, I want to write and I want to express myself in poetry.
What would you say is the skill set that would enable somebody to actually be good at it?
And if somebody isn't yet good at it, what should they study or learn to be able to be good at it?
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 if 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.
That's the first thing they have to write a child.
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?
It's impossible.
Well, you can be a professor, but not as a full-time poet.
It's hard to make a living as a full-time poet.
So when a poet like you writes a book, you expect to sell copies, but nobody's going to, there's no bestseller list for poetry, I assume.
Well, very rarely.
I mean, I could not earn my living from the sale of my books.
No.
But that's not why I do it.
An issue that we haven't talked about yet, which is race.
You grew up in a, I would guess say, somewhat segregated environment in Ohio.
Was that fair?
It's fairish.
And when you went to college, you were not, you know, along with a lot of other African-American girls and boys, right?
I tended to be the only one in the room, yes.
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.
And you married a man who was not African American.
And was that a challenge at that time when you did that in your community?
Or was this not a real big deal at that time?
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, so 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, you know, you're black, and I'm white, and 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.
Proud Moments 00:13:04
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?
Well, you know, in high school, I think I got the Womanhood Award.
So I was, I mean, I was a good student.
So they thought I would be a success, but they didn't know I was going to be a poet.
And I've had a lot of my friends from high school say, you know, we didn't know we were going to go that way.
So let me ask you about the awards you have.
I don't want to take all night, go through all your awards, but if I can remember them, you are the Poet Laurie of the United States, were.
And you were the first African-American person to be Poet Laurie of the United States.
You have won the National Medal of the Arts, the National Humanities Medal, both given by the President of the United States.
You have about 30 honorary degrees.
And there's virtually no award you could win that you haven't won yet, except for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which you could win.
So do you ever get tired of getting awards or honored?
Or how does it get hiring after a while after getting all these awards?
And when I was chairman of the board at Duke University, we gave you an honorary degree, well deserved.
So how does it feel to get all these honors?
And you often say, geez, I don't need any more honors or you're happy to get them.
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 that's 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 end over 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.
When you ever give a commencement address in poet form, poetic form, no, you can't do that.
That's too hard to do, probably.
I wrote one in the form of a poem and then put it into prose afterwards so they wouldn't know.
So I mentioned the Nobel Prize, and very few writers who are poets have won the Nobel Prize.
I mean, it's been a long time since a pure poet won it, and Robert Frost never won it.
And it's been a long time.
Why do you think that the Nobel people don't give poets the Nobel Prize for literature?
Well, you know, 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?
Yeah.
Now back to poetry.
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?
Oh, because that's where it all begins.
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 you must be very good at crossword puzzles, I assume.
Because, I mean, you're good at that.
I assume you know all these words, right?
Yes, I'm a crossword puzzle.
So you can do New York.
I'm a Sunday crossword puzzle and about it.
No, I can't do that because there are tricks to those puzzles too, you know.
But I do do one after another, it's true.
So I'd like to ask you, did your parents live to see your success?
I mean, you're extremely successful, but did your parents live to see this success?
Yes, they did.
And it was really wonderful.
My parents were both alive when I got the Pulitzer and when I became poet laureate and after that.
And it just, to see the look on their faces, you know, that was the best award of all.
Were your siblings as proud as your parents?
Or they said, well, we were pretty good too.
No, they've been great.
And in fact, my brother-in-law would go into my parents' room and check to see if my father had read my book, you know, one of my books of poems.
He said, well, this looks like it's read up to this point, so he's getting through it.
My father had said that he didn't understand poetry when I told him I wanted to be a poet.
So if you look at your incredible life, what would you say you're most proud of having achieved?
Oh my God.
Other than going through this interview.
What would you say you're most proud of?
Is it your Pulitzer Prize, your Poet Laureate, being a professor at the University of Virginia, making your parents proud?
What is it that you're most proud of having achieved?
Or everything.
It seems like almost everything, but I'll tell you one little story that made me so proud.
And this was, it happened here in this building.
As poet laureate, I had hosted every two weeks a poetry reading.
And I used to come into the Madison building.
I would come, I didn't come through the tunnels, I'd actually go across the street.
And there was a homeless man who was sitting out there all the time.
And I would say hi, and we would, you know, and I'd go on in.
And one day he asked me, he said, what are you doing in there?
And I said, we're giving poetry reading, you know, poetry readings every, and I said, it's kind of fun.
You should just come on in.
And the next time I went into it, he was there in the back.
But he was there.
And he came to every reading after that.
That was a great moment.
You beat that.
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?
It is difficult, I think, to try to convince someone to care by talking about why one should care.
I think the best thing to do would be to find a poem that would speak to them.
Don't even tell them it's a poem.
Just let it speak to them, read it to them.
And when they say, what was that?
You say, so have you ever thought that when you get cards from like Hallmark or something, they always have poems in there?
You have to wonder, are these poetry students who just didn't quite make it?
So they got that job?
But I mean, they have some nice poems.
Sometimes you get these cards.
They're okay, but not poet surprise quality.
Well, you know, one place where you can tell that poets are at is when descriptions on coffee pods and wine.
You know, a lot of the wine descriptions.
And in fact, I had a student who became a Somme, you know.
So when poets gather together, let's suppose I assume you have gatherings of poets from time to time, what do they talk about?
Talk about prose books they read or they talk about poetry.
What are poets who actually, what do they talk about?
Gossip about poets or what do they talk about?
Well, there's gossip, of course, but it depends.
It depends on where you're at and who you're with.
You could be with, I mean, I could be in a group of poets.
I'm thinking of a gathering recently with Furious Flower, which is a group of African-American poets.
And that topic went all over the place.
It was, you know, from poetry to who does this or that to what you're wearing and what the latest dances.
We're people, we're human beings.
And so we're going to talk about all those kind of things.
And very rarely do you sit there and talk about stanzas and things like that.
You might talk about commas.
So as we get ready to enter our 250th birthday, Thomas Jefferson wrote some sentences that may be among the most famous sentences in the world.
They might not quite be poetry, but they're lyrical.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
You ever think about whether Thomas Jefferson could write poetry?
Because he wrote it in prose form.
It was very lyrical and very poetic, not quite poetry perhaps.
And what is your wish for our country as we get ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding?
Well, actually those very words, which are very poetic, I agree, we hold these truths, you know, which has a double meaning to be self-evident.
And you've already established something as self-evident, though it isn't.
Really, not in our world today.
But I would hope that all men are created equal.
If we could get that one sentence down, man, we'd be on the road to success in this country.
I hope we can get there someday, and I hope sooner rather than later.
I want to thank you for a really interesting conversation about poetry, and I'm going to start reading some more poetry, okay?
Yay!
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
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.
Don't Forget Her 00:02:55
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.
Poet Rita Dove viewed artifacts from the Library of Congress's archive.
Hello.
Hello.
We're going to actually start at this point.
We're going to start here, so I won't look until we can get.
Hello.
Hello.
We're so glad you're here.
It's so great to be here.
Frederick Douglass: Revising Autobiographies 00:03:48
I'm Barbara, and this is Elizabeth.
We're both from the manuscript division here at the library.
And all of the things on the tables are mostly poetry, but other writings too.
We hope you'll enjoy seeing.
I've been looking forward to this cut.
So the first thing you'll see, it's what we're like.
Oh my gosh.
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.
I too.
Oh, look at this, and then the dashes, because he's not sure what to put in there at that moment.
That's incredible.
It is incredible.
And it's this very famous passage about, you know, what is the distance between us?
Distance avails not.
Is it 500 years or is it a thousand years?
Look at that.
There it is, man.
And the other thing is that 1892 is the title page for the deathbed edition.
So 1855, the very first thing, and then he revises and revises and revises and adds more poems and changes how they're configured.
And the final edition he creates is the 1992.
And you can see how he had meticulous control over everything he was always revising.
So all of this?
Yes, all the handwriting is him changing it and pasting it up.
And then I was so moved when I read the poem that he chose to paste on the title page at the end.
He dies very shortly after this in March of 1892.
Oh my goodness, but it's come, said my soul, it's like viruses from my body.
Let us write, for we are one.
The notebook is all about the body and the soul.
And this is the excellence of the poem.
It must have the body and the soul.
So he started with it.
And then he's saying, you will see me again.
So it's the sentiment of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.
This is fantastic.
It's amazing.
It is truly, truly fantastic.
Look at this.
Oh my goodness.
And so, wow.
Okay, I'm speechless already.
Okay, the next, Frederick Douglass.
So we have a theme of revision.
And as you know, he wrote three versions of his autobiography.
Yes.
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 Bondage and 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.
How they did it, because others would come.
That's right.
Or they would know.
He did it by wearing a sailor's uniform and using sailors' papers that he borrowed from someone else.
And he was nervous because he didn't really look that much like this person, but they didn't.
But that's how he got through.
But they didn't want other people to say, now we have to check all these sailors' papers.
And also, if they caught him, the person who blew him the papers would suffer.
Would suffer, yes.
So finally, he got to tell the story.
C-SPAN Coverage 00:03:14
He got along.
He had to keep it secret.
And he doesn't name the person, but he's basically thanking them.
This is such amazing penmanship, too.
Yes.
And you can see, too, he's revising.
As he goes along, of course.
See more with Rita Dove and the Library of Congress's archive on America's Book Club, The Treasures, available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
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