Upon arrival at the "temporary home" of Pulitzer Prize-winning former P t Laureate Rita Dove and her husband, novelist Fred Viebahn, the PW visitor is struck by how untemporary the Charlottesville, Va., quarters seem. Dove moves leisurely through the spacious, comfortably furnished rooms and tells, in dramatic detail, of how their permanent home was struck by lightning last fall, causing a fire that destroyed the attic and second floor. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the fire did consume irreplaceable archival material and personal possessions. Although Viebahn lost a number of his unpublished manuscripts and works-in-progress, Dove did not, and both their computers emerged, water damaged and charred, with hard drives miraculously intact.
Dove is philosophical about the fire: "It's devastating and fascinating to watch your house go up in flames," she says with remarkable serenity. "Okay, its gone. I guess I can do without that. Start over."
When picking through the remains of the house, Dove says, every little thing she could salvage was "like a gift". In fact, much of what initially looked incinerated was salvageable, and boxes of manuscripts and books were sent into cold storage.
The havoc of relocating, finding storage space and seeing to the rebuilding of the house, while time-consuming and tedious, posed no real threat of interruption to Dove's recent writing, as her seventh collection of p try, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (just out from Norton), attests. The collection is filled with Dove's signature blend of masterfully polished images and spare, musical storytelling; and has an unusual circular structure. On the Bus opens with a cycle called "Cameos," which explores a young man's experience (loosely based on Dove's paternal grandfather) growing up in a large family and becoming a scientist. The closing p ms comprise another cycle that ruminates on the political and private life of Rosa Parks, the black woman from Selma who sparked the civil rights movement by refusing to give her seat at the front of a bus to a white passenger. The book's title was another gift of sorts: while attending a conference in Williamsburg, Va., Dove's teenage daughter Aviva, who was accompanying her, nudged her mother and whispered, "Hey, we're on the bus with Rosa Parks!" Indeed they were. The famous icon was sitting in a front bus seat, big as life. The phrase stayed with Dove, and eventually worked its way into the book's powerful last verse cycle.
Close proximity to history-makers and famous figures is nothing new to Dove, however. When PW visits her office at the University of Virginia, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English and teaches in the graduate writing program, the bright, busy little room that overlooks the campus's historic Jeffersonian architecture is filled with evidence of Dove's prominent place in not only American literature, but in the wider culture as well. There are numerous photos (most taken by Viebahn) of the p t with the Clintons, with various Nobel laureates, including Nelson Mandela, Octavio Paz and Joseph Brodsky, and even Oprah Winfrey.
Dove's public visibility, beginning around the time she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon), and continuing through and beyond her 1993-1995 term as U.S. P t Laureate, took its toll. Although Dove saw the laureateship as an honor and an opportunity -- "If the fact that I'm a black woman makes a grandmother take her granddaughter to a reading, that's fine," she says -- the demands of the position made it hard for her to have a private life. When the situation threatened to blur the line between her commitment to public work and her need for silent, contemplative time to write, Dove realized that "things weren't going to get back to normal," so she had a writing cabin built. The cabin, situated in the lush backyard of the fire-damaged home -- and unscathed by the disaster -- has become her sanctuary, a place where her writing time and energy are protected.
Although it's a little inconvenient and frustrating for the time being, Dove, who loves to write at night, makes the trip from her house to the one-room structure to write. And one can see why she makes the effort. The cabin is cheerful and cozy, overlooking a dreamy pond, with a handsome stand-up desk built by Dove's father. There is a wonderful calm around the p t in this place, her multicolored manicure flashing in the sun as we speak about "Seven for Luck," the song cycle she wrote that was recently performed at Tanglewood by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Dove is also anxious to talk about her play, The Darker Face of the Earth, a reworking of Sophocles's dipus Rex set in the historical context of slavery in America. The play will open at the Royal National Theatre in London on August 5.
Music and theater have long interested Dove, who has played jazz and classical music since her youth, and currently enjoys singing opera. Her attention to language's musical and dramatic elements developed early on, and growing up in a family of charismatic storytellers has had its happy impact on the p t, giving her words for her music.
A Bold Vocation
As a child in Akron, Ohio, Dove recalls reading voraciously and listening to her relatives spin tales and reminiscences, teaching the young girl much about timing and word choice, creating suspenseful narratives and changing the tale to fit the occasion. "These were not ordinary storytellers," Dove says, "and not an ordinary use of language." Her eventual fluency in German furthered her understanding of the idiosyncrasies and technical intricacies of English.
Dove grew up, she says, with the expectation that, since she was a good student, she would become a doctor or a lawyer, and she entered college as a pre-law major. She remembers a key discovery in her adolescence, when her 11th-grade English teacher (who is now in her 80s, and whom Dove still sees) took her to a John Ciardi book signing, giving Dove her first glimpse of a living writer.
Although no one in Dove's community said anything against p try, it was hardly recommended as a vocation Dove understood that the p tic life would be a luxury that she could afford to pursue only while young and "resilient enough to starve."
In 1975, Dove was the only black student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She makes a wry comment about tokenism, noting that Sandra Cisneros was the only Hispanic there and Joy Harjo the one Native American.
Over two decades later, with a host of literary laurels and a dazzling career in full swing, Dove is still sobered by the thought that multicultural representation is still not a given at this point in our country's literary landscape.
Earlier this year, Viebahn, who is white, launched a heated debate in the p try community by assailing the Academy of American P ts' all-white board of chancellors for its lack of representational diversity. The flap hit the New York Times when two chancellors, Maxine Kumin and Carolyn Kizer, resigned from the board in protest. While some p ts were chagrined that Viebahn, who is not a p t, ignited the controversy, Dove asserts that she was and is prepared to handle any backlash that may affect her, acknowledging, "If anyone takes the heat, it will be me. And I can take it."
Dove spoke to other writers about the Academy controversy, many of whom admitted to being afraid to speak out against the prominent organization, she says. It is this fearful silence that Dove finds disturbing. The dispute "sends a message to all p ts that confronting a powerful institution about this is not a self-destructive thing." Doing nothing, Dove points out, is an action too.
"This is a healthy discussion" she adds, noting that "the chancellors hold a psychological and symbolic power," one that she feels shapes a nation of p ts' perceptions of literary authority.
Since the controversy erupted, the Academy has taken the problem seriously. After an open call for suggestions to change the electoral process for the board, the Academy has elected nine new chancellors. These include Pulitzer Prize winners Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Charles Wright; and distinguished veteran p ts Lucille Clifton and Adrienne Rich. Other new chancellors are Robert Creeley, Heather McHugh, Michael Palmer and Rosanna Warren. This infusion of new blood is, Dove says, "great news. The diversity not only of gender and race but of region and school of thought is really exciting." And the fact that the Academy instituted changes so quickly indicates to her that they acknowledge the importance of this issue.
Dove's tenacious belief in personal responsibility for public affairs is ech d throughout her new book, most notably in the sections about Rosa Parks, wherein the p t examines the critical moment when the woman whose name is now synonymous with the civil rights movement stepped into history by sitting down. Dove is a master at transforming a public or historic element, re-envisioning a spectacle and unearthing the heartfelt, wildly original private thoughts such historic moments always contain. She believes that everyday, ordinary life yields simultaneously public and private elements, and that an oscillation between context and the interiority of a subject is a useful way to deal with race and gender. Dove is intent on creating a p try contextualized in the world while remaining true to her private vision, or as she puts it, "I don't think of p try as a refuge or a soapbox." She believes that if p try lets itself get locked into one or the other, it becomes necessarily limited.
Dove speaks eloquently of the "serenity one might bring to the task of doing what one knows is right," and deftly describes the circumstances of Parks's emergence as a public figure. She points out that there were other people who did what Parks did, but that there were political reasons why Parks's act "took." The local NAACP and other local civil rights groups, she says, were looking for the "right person" for the revolutionary event. Dove includes in her new p ms Claudette Colvin and Mary Smith -- two women who were arrested for not relinquishing their bus seats before Parks was -- in part to honor these women, but also to note that the kind of public scrutiny these particular people would have been subjected to might have "eroded them," as Dove says. "Parks was the one who could take the heat, who couldn't be debunked."
Now the notion of "taking the heat" has come up twice in this conversation, and one can't help but note the thematic links between this discussion of Parks, Dove's stand on the Academy debate and the very real fire that engulfed her home. "People might say, how dare I think my position analogous to that of Rosa Parks," she says. But for Dove, Parks is a role model, someone who embodies the very notion of dignified, keen self-possession, a standard that Dove holds herself to. "Any time we identify with a person who is truly larger than life it is because we measure ourselves by their life."
As she speaks, Dove's own fiery energy rises to the occasion. Her radiant intensity has, it seems, the power to ignite the room.
Shaughnessy is a New-York-based freelancer and p t.
