Rita Dove’s most recent books are Playlist for the Apocalypse (W.W. Norton 2021) and Collected Poems 1974-2004 (W.W. Norton 2016). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and the Hurst/Wright Legacy Award, among numerous other honors, Dove served as United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. Noted in The Washington Post as “one of the nation’s most distinguished literary figures” and praised in The Boston Globe as “perhaps the best public poet we have,” she is the only poet to have been awarded both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Dove has published eleven collections of poetry, a novel, a collection of short stories, a verse play, and an essay collection, and she has written lyrics and libretti for musical works by several notable composers. I corresponded with Dove about her most recent poetry collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, her views on the evolution of poetry in relation to the internet and social media, her commitment to the challenge of producing work that “is honest and dangerous in all of the right ways,” and her moving final correspondence with critic Helen Vendler. We also discussed the most memorable aspects of her experience as United States Poet Laureate, and the ways in which her Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis has transformed her life both on and off the page, among a range of other subjects.
CD: What are some of your earliest experiences connecting with poetry? Is there a specific poem that grabbed you at a young age and became rooted in your mind and body after you encountered it on the page? If so, what was it about the language that enthralled you, and do you see any direct throughlines from that enchantment to the effects you’ve sought to achieve in your own work?
RD: My earliest memories of poems involve flipping through an anthology on my parents’ bookshelf. I’m not sure if they got it through a mail order book club or in a secondhand bookstore, but it was thick, with a colorful, ostentatious jacket cover, and a title like A Treasury of Best Loved Poems. The table of contents went from what seemed the beginning of time until the 1940s. I was especially struck by William Blake’s “A Poison Tree”—to think that you could be evil in a poem! “A Poison Tree” was certainly on my mind when I wrote “Parsley,” my poem about the Dominican Dictator, General Rafael Trujillo. In a way, Blake gave me permission to enter the mind of that villainous figure.
Another early encounter with poetry, oddly enough, came through Mad Magazine. I loved its satire, and some of the spoofs based on classical texts sent me back to the originals. I recognized passages from Shakespeare, and again Blake (“Tiger, Tiger burning bright / In the ballparks of the night. / Your pitching’s keen, your field adroit; / So why no pennants for Detroit?”), and I relished the intricate and sometimes quite unexpected rhymes. The sardonic manner that was Mad Magazine’s modus operandi extended into the linguistic twists of those spoofs, and it is a way of nuancing that I use in my own work sometimes, like a smile beneath the sadness.
CD: Your most recent collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, which is divided into six sections, contains a sweeping breadth of subject matter. We encounter poems examining the origins of the word “ghetto,” poems written from the viewpoint of a spring cricket, and poems centered on exploring your experience with Multiple Sclerosis, in addition to poems on many other topics. Was there a particular juncture in the manuscript’s development that gave you an “aha!” moment as far as determining the book’s shape and direction?
RD: A good number of the poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse had been languishing without a home for quite some time. The first clutch of ghetto poems was completed in 2016-2017, and some of the spring cricket poems go back even further. The sections just didn’t seem to fit together, though I sensed there was a place waiting for them. Then the pandemic grabbed all of us, and during that period of widespread panic, uncertainty, and tragedy—I was unable to go to my father’s funeral, and his younger sister, the last aunt in the family, succumbed to COVID—I stumbled into the unexpected blessing of free time at home. I didn’t have to think about traveling or presenting myself to the outside world as a capital-P Poet. That’s when I started to understand those poems as companions on a journey rather than solitary individuals with one story to declaim. Taken together, they began to operate much like a DJ’s playlist, or a mixtape compiled for a dear friend. Once the organization of the manuscript as a book took hold, I was able to complete all of the sections, including the more contemporary ghetto poems and the angry odes, while sheltering in place.
CD: Playlist for the Apocalypse contains a variety of poems that explore what it means to be a writer. For example, in “Climacteric,” the speaker relishes “every minute spent jostling syllables” while the rest of the world carries on around her. In “A Sonnet for the Sonnet,” the speaker both bristles against and longs for the “rose-garlanded throne” of literary tradition. How has your writing process evolved over the years, and in what ways, if any, have the expectations and pressures that accompany fame impacted your relationship to the blank page?
RD: My tools of the trade evolved following the trajectory of most baby boomers, from a manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric to the wonder of computers. But my poems always began with pen on paper, lines scribbled with a Bic ballpoint onto college-ruled note paper, the same method I’d used to compose all of my high school essays and fill blue book after blue book for final exams as an undergraduate. Those humble instruments helped me circumnavigate the crushing enormity of my daring—namely, to write great poetry. I began small. Writing by hand also imposed the rigor of not being able to see what form the poem took on the printed page. I had to sound out each poem’s shape, guided by breath and the way the mouth and tongue shape themselves around a word as it rises into utterance, until I could feel the length of a line and the syllabic cadences that pushed it along.
The next stage entailed transferring my handwritten drafts to typescript. Because the transfer from script to print always felt brutal and dismayingly permanent, as soon as I pulled a page from the typewriter, I would grab a pen and begin revising, or messing up the canvas, so to speak. This was my preferred method of composition, my writing ritual, and the advent of personal computers did little to change the basic process. Computers simply sped up the typing stage because I didn’t have to worry as much about typos.
Then a medical complication interfered: multiple sclerosis. I lost the ability to write by hand for extended periods of time. It’s an odd triggering mechanism: I can autograph books, a very repetitive activity, for hours, but as soon as I set out to write a poem, where I forget myself in the excitement of discovery, my hand begins to jerk. First, I lose precision, then my control over the movement wavers, and following that my writing veers into the illegible. I’m still struggling to finetune alternative methods for delaying the visual impact of a draft—for example, I’ll use dictation or print out a draft in different fonts. Both methods help thwart the temptation to judge an enjambment solely by how it looks.
Most writers wrestle with the specter of self-consciousness at some stage during composition, and that became especially acute for me after winning the Pulitzer and serving as Poet Laureate. Suddenly, a wider world was looking over my shoulder. In response, my rituals became a bit more extreme. I’ve always been a night person, but I began writing from midnight to sunrise. It was a quiet time during which both the literary and academic worlds were asleep, or were on hold, at least temporarily.
CD: Another striking poem in Playlist for the Apocalypse that explores the writing life is “Shakespeare Doesn’t Care,” which ends with the following lines:
What does he care
if we all die tomorrow?
He lives in his words. You wrestle,
enraptured, with yours.
What time does with them
next, or ever after,
is someone else’s rodeo.
These lines bring to mind T.S. Eliot’s statement about the relationship between writers and readers: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” Having no control over “what time does” with one’s work can seem both terrifying and liberating. Would you share some of your thoughts on that?
RD: That the reception of my work is ultimately beyond my control is not a particularly terrifying prospect to me. It is what it is. I see it as a challenge to make sure that the writing is honest and dangerous in all of the right ways, to imagine—to hope?—that someone stumbling upon a poem of mine—a scrap of paper in a field of rubble somewhere, with no indication of author or provenance—will be moved. Do I sound gruesome? I’m actually a very cheerful person!
CD: Your work has been noted for the artful way that you merge the personal and the historical. How do you navigate the push-and-pull between literal truth and poetic truth when writing poems that explore historical events, and what is the role of research in your process? Also, what are your thoughts on finding a balance between narrative imperatives and lyric impulses when writing poems that engage with the intersection between the personal and the historical?
RD: The way that the personal and historical merge in a poem is different for every writer and every poem, and for every moment in every poem. The personal memories in Thomas and Beulah, for example, meld with the historical trajectory of my grandparents’ generation in a radically different manner from the way in which the personal and the historical interact in Sonata Mulattica. In the latter, the historical incidents punctuating George Bridgewater’s life become a personal chronicle that is mostly imagined by me but is also based on the actual facts of his biography.
To give you a general overview of how I approach incorporating historical material into my work, when it comes to broadening my knowledge on a specific subject, I research the hell out of whatever it is, following every tangent no matter how miniscule or silly (I’ve learned more about the lives of crickets than anyone other than a biologist would ever need to know!). But invariably, I reach a point where I need to put the research aside and actually write. Sometimes it’s for the duration of a single poem, and sometimes I abandon the research for longer, three months or more, waiting for the spark that will free me from the constraints of “just the facts” so that I can fully inhabit the characters and stories with my imagination.
Sonata Mulattica, which began with research, took shape from my desire to have more than a few stark factoids about George Bridgetower. In other instances, the research entered my process much later. Thomas and Beulah started as an act of reimagination, and I turned to research only when I felt that I needed factual support undergirding my depiction of my grandparents’ lives. I’ve also written numerous stand-alone historical poems, each resting on different authentic underpinnings.
My only mantra, if you could call it that, is to avoid forcing a poem into existence based solely on the facts. The poems in the section titled “After Egypt” in my book Playlist for the Apocalypse, for instance, were a result of a residency in Italy sponsored by the University of Venice. The university commissioned me to write poems under the rubric “Reimagining the Ghetto.” For five weeks, I wandered the alleys of that first Jewish enclave, read all I could find on Sarra Copia Sulam, and explored every side canal and hidden courtyard. I took copious notes without writing a single line that would make its way into those poems. Oh, I wrote a few other poems while there, yes, just not those that eventually comprised the ghetto poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse.
CD: The poetry scholar and critic Helen Vendler passed away last April, and it has become a matter of literary legend among poets, critics, and word lovers of all stripes that she wrote an email to you shortly before her passing. After you edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, which was published in 2011, she wrote a review that criticized the anthology for focusing on “multicultural inclusiveness” above quality, and you penned a response that was published in The New York Review of Books. Both her review and your response sparked an impassioned and continuing debate in the literary world. Would you talk about the experience of receiving a message from Vendler before her death?
RD: Helen’s email arrived while I was in the middle of teaching an undergraduate poetry writing seminar. We had just taken our standard break, fifteen minutes in the middle of a two-and-a-half-hour workshop. I usually don’t check my phone during that time, but for some reason on that spring day, I did. The subject header was “Goodbye from a Great Admirer.” In her message, Helen said that she’d be dead by the time the email reached me.
Of course I was shaken. Who wouldn’t be? But I continued to teach the second half of the class. We were approaching the end of the semester, and the students were presenting revisions of earlier poems. They were talking about the process of reshaping their work, and discussing the snags they had either resolved or were still working on—delicate stuff. I didn’t want to interrupt that fragile balance.
I have no idea how I managed, or what I said. The students didn’t seem to notice anything unusual. As soon as class was over, I rushed to my office and dashed off a reply. I had little expectation that she’d receive it, but I decided not to take her at her word—was I defying Helen Vendler yet again?—in the hopes that my message would reach her in time, giving both of us closure. Although I knew I had acted in good faith when editing the Penguin anthology, and that my fury at her review was righteous, I did mourn the end of our friendship. Her son let me know that he was able to read my words to her and that, as he put it, “she was glad to have heard it,” which meant a great deal to me.
I have nothing new to add to the literary tempest that resulted from the whole affair, now more than a decade ago. I’ll leave it to the readers of the anthology to form their own opinions. But to reconnect with Helen after all of those bitter years, almost too late, while she took her last breath—suffice it to say that I was both profoundly grateful for it and deeply unsettled for days.
CD: It would be interesting to move from the critical discourse about the Penguin anthology to a poem in Playlist for the Apocalypse titled “The Spring Cricket’s Discourse on Critics.” Readers can’t help but find humor in the notion of a spring cricket engaging with the world of literary criticism, and it quickly becomes clear that the humor is part of the poem’s strategy. It also becomes evident right away that the cricket speaker is a canny choice because crickets, much like poets, are song-making creatures. The poem ends with the following stanza:
I’m gonna sit here
awhile and watch the dew
drop: its letting go
so lurid a metaphor for Failure,
I can’t help but take it
out of circulation. Everybody’s
hungry, everybody’s hunkered
in their hedges, hanging on—
in the end nothing’s left
to talk about but Style.
The capitalization of “Failure” and “Style” grabs the reader’s attention, as does the alliteration with those “h” sounds toward the end of the stanza. The latter effect calls purposeful attention to the poet’s “style” just before the spring cricket concludes that “in the end nothing’s left / to talk about but Style.” Would you elaborate for us on your view of the interaction between poetry and literary criticism?
RD: On the one hand, this poem contains all that I care to say about the interaction between poetry and literary criticism. On the other hand, I want to stress how much I value the passionate attention that serious critics give to the work at hand. Their task is not an easy one, and it is, in fact, a rather thankless mission because no artist likes to be criticized. But the cricket has a valid point when he says, “in the end nothing’s left / to talk about but Style.” If a poem has done its job, no other words can encapsulate that poem’s magic. To devote oneself to the challenge of responding to “the best words in the best order” by resorting to more words is a divine fool’s errand. We know it’s impossible, but we’re thankful that someone is attempting to do it. In that sense, writing criticism is sort of like writing poetry, though with wildly different results. The best a critic can do is explain how the magic works by opening the curtain, exposing the strings and hidden trap doors, without deflating our sense of wonder.
CD: Your book Thomas and Beulah, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, contains a semi-fictionalized series of poems exploring your grandparents’ marriage in the context of the Great Migration. In his interview with you for the “Art of Poetry” series in The Paris Review, Kevin Young describes the revelatory experience of discovering Thomas and Beulah as an African American high school student in the 1980s. Many poets over the years, much like Young, have talked about Thomas and Beulah as a book that opened up new possibilities for them. In light of that, it would be interesting to hear you discuss what made Thomas and Beulah take shape as a possibility in your own mind.
RD: Unlikely as it might sound, three white male poets contributed mightily to the creation of Thomas and Beulah. First and foremost, Stanley Plumley. When I was a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stanley taught a Forms of Poetry seminar focused on poetic sequences. One of the assigned books was Audubon: A Vision by Robert Penn Warren, the second white male influence. That strange, lyrical, and brutal meditation opened me to the possibilities of delving into the interior life of a character via the unguarded territory of thought. I started a sequence of poems based on slave narratives, some of which appear in my first book The Yellow House on the Corner, and thus I began exploring, thanks to Stanley’s inspiration, the searing intimacy that writing in persona can invite.
The third white male influence on Thomas and Beulah was James Merrill, whose book Divine Comedies came out while I was a graduate student. Divine Comedies contains “The Book of Ephraim,” a long poem introducing readers to Merrill’s long-time communications via Ouija board with the spirit world. Two years later, as soon as it came out, I snapped up Merrill’s Mirabell: Books of Number, and then his Scripts for the Pageant in 1980. Another book that impacted me at the time was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which gave me the courage to trust that an ordinary black person’s life could resonate with readers of every stripe. As far as individual poems that helped shape Thomas and Beulah, Robert Hayden’s quietly haunting “Those Winter Sundays” has resided in me, like a pacemaker, for as long as I can remember.
Once I realized that it was possible to string third-person persona poems together like lyrical beads to create a narrative necklace, Thomas and Beulah took on new forms, and my mother became the most significant influence. I had told her that I was writing semi-biographical pieces about her parents, yet she never asked to vet the poems. In fact, she shared her memories of her mother and father without questioning my research plan—a good thing, because I had no plan! Every weekend we’d talk on the phone, with my inquiries leading to inexplicable tangents that she willingly followed. Without her, Thomas and Beulah would never have come to fruition.
CD: You served as United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, and yours was a historical laureateship because you were both the youngest person and the first African American to ever hold the position. What are some of the most surprising discoveries you made during that time about poetry’s presence in American culture, and have you observed any significant changes in poetry’s cultural presence since then?
RD: The biggest surprise was that people actually paid attention to the idea of a national Poet Laureate. I was amazed by the media awareness that my appointment attracted, which included coverage by NPR and PBS, of course, but also CNN and CBS, not to mention quite a slew of print publications as varied as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and Girl Scouts Magazine. I even traded eights with Big Bird on Sesame Street! This was before the onslaught of social media as we know it today, so there was no such thing as a podcast or vlog. Producing a poetry video in the manner of early MTV music videos was completely new territory.
My laureateship happened to coincide with a phenomenal uptick in the cultural appetite for poetry. Of course, I understood that having achieved several historical firsts made me fodder for the human-interest portion of the news, but what truly astonished me was the outpouring of correspondence from ordinary people—and remember, this happened when letters were still either written by hand or clacked out on typewriters—who wished to share their personal experiences with poetry. I wasn’t getting envelopes stuffed with poems, or pleas for help in getting work published (ok, maybe there were a few), but rather missives written by people from all walks of life—lawyers, teenagers, stay-at-home moms, executives, modern dancers, construction workers. All they wanted was to tell me how poetry had changed their lives. Sometimes I felt a bit like a priest receiving a confessional because so many of the letter-writers were filled with remorse or embarrassment, remorse because they had stopped reading poetry despite loving it when they were younger, and embarrassment because they thought that they didn’t understand poetry. Nearly all of the letters that began with “I don’t know much about poetry” would pivot on the word “but,” at which point the writers would invariably proceed to offer a thoughtful interpretation of a particular poem that moved them, or that they still carried around in their wallet.
Some of the people who wrote to me focused on sharing their first encounters with poetry. I remember one letter from a white man, who had grown up on a farm in Kansas or Nebraska, describing the mobile Public Library that came through the rural community of his childhood. He had to finish his chores before he could sign up for his very first library card. By the time he’d made it there and could fill out the forms, the library bus was about to close, so he grabbed the nearest book and checked it out. After the bus chugged away, he plopped down under the nearest tree, only to discover he was holding a book of poems by someone named Paul Lawrence Dunbar. It was the only book he had, and the library bus wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks, so he started reading it, and he fell in love with poetry. I teared up at that point: Here was a living testimony that we are all connected, regardless of class, race, or gender, and that poetry can illuminate those connections.
CD: It would be fascinating for our readers to hear about a time when you found yourself stuck on an especially difficult piece of writing, such as a single poem or a series of poems that seemed to resist your efforts. What factors did you struggle with when shaping the work in question, and how would you describe your process in arriving at a breakthrough on the piece? Related to that, what are some of your thoughts about determining when to persist with a piece of writing and when to scrap it?
RD: I can think of two off of the top of my head—but oh, there have been many! That it took me years to finish the poem “Parsley” has been documented in other places, so I won’t go into it here except to say this: I was also working on numerous other poems during that period while re-visiting those failed “Parsley” drafts from time to time, and there were many valuable moments of serendipity and research to offset the toil of rewrites.
The larger struggle came with my book Sonata Mulattica. There were two main obstacles: First, I was dealing with a real person, the Afro-European violinist George Bridgetower, along with the facts surrounding both his rise to fame and his eventual fall from the spotlight. Bridgetower premiered what was arguably Beethoven’s most famous sonata before they had a falling out, just a few days after the premiere, over a girl. As a result, Bridgetower was stripped of the sonata’s dedication. How a mixed-race violinist ended up in the world of classical music in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe struck me as the real mystery, and I realized that my research would need to be extensive and perhaps academic in nature.
The second obstacle materialized one day, in a flash, when I realized that inhabiting Beethoven’s voice would be an especially difficult challenge. It was one thing to write a poem exploring the mindset of a villain like General Trujillo, as I did in “Parsley,” or to channel the testimonies of unnamed enslaved laborers, as I did in the slave narrative poems in my first book, but it was another matter altogether to tackle that marble bust presiding over many a pianist’s mantlepiece.
Once I recognized that Beethoven was another hurdle, I could see that I’d been wrong in my approach to crafting the sequence. I had been trying to concentrate on Bridgetower without appreciating the fact that I had to contend with the Great Master as well. I had to dare to become Beethoven, to slip into his skin so that I could understand his physical and psychological state at the time of his meeting this young, dark-skinned, flamboyant ladies’ man. I began to grapple on the page not just with Beethoven’s jealousy but also his angst over deafness and mortality. From then on, the writing was relatively easy.
I don’t throw away any drafts because I can never say with certainty that a piece of writing has completely failed. There may be a line, a phrase, or even a word waiting to ignite a future fire. I love to leaf through those sheafs of scribblings and old notebooks, piled up like treasure in Ali Baba’s cave.
CD: Some writers and educators view our current moment as an exciting time for poetry, given the art form’s ability to reach a wide online audience, while others fret that the internet has shortened the attention spans of contemporary readers. What are some of your thoughts about digital life in relation to poetry?
RD: If you had asked me this question fifteen years ago, I would have been optimistic about the ways in which social media seemed poised to further the literary arts. After all, the World Wide Web had streamlined the writing process for authors across every genre by making it easier than ever before to conduct research into just about any topic. In addition, platforms like Facebook and Instagram had enabled writers to access and incorporate of-the-moment cultural trends in their work, which made the literary arts feel more “relevant” to many readers and resulted in an ever-growing audience for poetry. Because of social media, a new kind of anonymous intimacy had evolved in the form of virtual communities, where lovers of literature and poetry discovered that they could join in conversation with like-minded strangers.
But quite a few downsides have cropped up in the not-so-many years since social media took over the reins of communication and information dissemination. Of particular note, there has been a marked decrease in attention span among both readers and writers. When it comes to poetry, I’ve noticed that readers demonstrate a vastly diminished willingness to live with a poem for longer than it takes to skim its lines, along with a resistance to investing in a poem’s multiple layers.
Writing poems in the age of social media has become too easy and often overly glib. Autocorrect can be the devil, but it saves a lot of time. Rather than pondering the veracity of a certain occurrence, you can just Google it. If you crave feedback, there’s an audience at your fingertips, and we all want to be loved and feel that our poems are understood. The poet begins to seek attention in the form of clicked likes.
On top of that, of course, we now have the poltergeist of AI, the epitome of all that is dangerous about online life.
CD: In a 2012 interview with “Big Think,” you talk in compelling ways about the difference between drafting and revising. When you sit down to revise a poem, what are some of the factors that guide your decision-making process, and how much does an awareness of audience impact your thinking as you shape a poem into its final form?
RD: When drafting, I try to keep my mind as open as possible to allow for an inrush of ideas, snippets of dialogue, and errant descriptions. Drafting certainly contains elements of self-hypnosis in the sense that utterance is funneled through the pen or the keyboard, to spill onto the page or screen. Nowadays, more and more, this process also takes its path through a microphone before voice recognition software transfers it to text. In a draft, no matter the technique or tools used, mess is good. Revision, by contrast, is more oriented toward the text, whether I’m editing via keyboard or writing by hand. It’s part cleanup and part wild goose chase, a quest in search of the ineffable, a hunt for the golden thread that will guide me through the labyrinthian pathways of the draft.
I love the revision process. It’s a combination of trimming and expanding the poem-to-be, shaping and reshaping it, with periodic instances where the mind opens up again, which happens most intensely when I find myself pursuing a tangent I might have missed earlier in the draft’s clutter.
I should clarify that there can be many drafts. I might begin a poem several times, then cobble it together from assorted variations. Or I might start refining a draft only to have it break free from formal or aesthetic restrictions and veer off into an entirely different direction—no longer a revision, but a new draft. I relish these squirrely writing moments!
When revising, I often apply what may seem like random filters, technical tweaks such as comparing the left-hand side of a poem to the right-hand side to see where my prepositional phrases have landed, or to gauge how many of the lines are end-stopped or enjambed. I may count how many nouns there are compared to adjectives. Although nouns are often reassuring, they can also become stultifying and weigh the poem down.
Those are a few of the predictable, hands-on techniques that I use. What else happens in terms of craftmanship and beyond—what must happen for a revision to succeed—is more mystical. I look for the music, listen to the sounds the words, lines, and stanzas are making, without considering their meaning. What is the poem trying to say, not in terms of its literal content but in the whispers beneath or behind the utterances? Very often the key to tuning into a confession that’s been muted or hidden lies in the attention paid to the music of the poem’s language.
I rarely consider my audience, for the simple reason that I can’t predict who that audience might be. If I try to second-guess a poem’s potential readers while I’m writing it, I’m shutting myself off from possibility. The best way to think of my audience is to imagine a complete stranger, one I can neither visualize nor categorize, picking up a poem long after I am gone. That’s the standard I set for a poem before allowing it to be published.
CD: In “Parsley,” you write about the racially-driven mass murder of Haitians in the Dominican Republican during the 1930s. “Parsley” makes a striking companion piece to a poem in Playlist for the Apocalypse titled “Keep Your Storied Pomp,” in which you explore the role of language in contemporary politics:
Welcome to the Age of Babble!
Here a twitter, there a tweet; a tiki torch march
back to the Good Ole Times of mayhem and murder.
Both poems probe the connection between the way that humans use language and the real-life political consequences of words spoken and written. George Orwell’s famous assertion comes to mind in this context: “Political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” Would you elaborate for us on your beliefs about the interaction between language and politics, and on your view of the poet’s role in relation to that interaction?
RD: Orwell’s words remind me of Auden’s famous (and oft-misinterpreted) pronouncement that “poetry makes nothing happen,” a line from his eulogy for W.B. Yeats. Auden then asserts that poetry “survives / in the valley of its making … it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” It’s precisely the ability of artistic expression to persist, despite all efforts to thwart or muffle it, that presents a threat to those perpetrators of political chaos whose aim is dictatorial dominion. The free use of language leads them to strike out against media and libraries, commandeer vocabulary with misleading phrases like “fake news,” and kidnap words such as “terrific” and “tremendous” by overusing them until they’re meaningless, followed by the censoring or outright banning of books from the curricula in our nation’s classrooms.
Poetry’s responsibility to politics? Of course, none at all, but in a free society, politics bears a responsibility toward poetry because poems are a mechanism of protection from censorship and corruption. To adopt the rhetorical tactics of politicians—exhortation, catchy phrasings, exaggerations and lies, clichéd statements instead of truthful creations—is to turn one’s back on the very wellspring of poetry. This doesn’t mean that one can’t write a political poem, merely that the goal, always, should be to write a great poem that reaches beyond the political.
CD: Several poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse are pieces produced on commission, including “Youth Sunday,” which was commissioned by The New York Times Sunday Magazine, “Girls on the Town, 1946,” which was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic, and the fourteen-poem lyric sequence “A Standing Witness,” which was commissioned by Copland House. How does the process of producing work on commission differ from your usual approach to writing, and do you feel as though generating commissioned poems has led you to make any discoveries on the page that you may not have otherwise made?
RD: I never accept a commission unless the project description stirs the embers inside of me. Even if the proposal speaks to me, I’ll sketch out some ideas or at least a few scattered lines before accepting, just to be sure that initial stirring was truly a creative spark and not mere intellectual fascination. When I was asked to write a poem in honor of women’s suffrage rights, commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic, the photograph of my mother and her girlfriends that inspired “Girls on the Town, 1946” sprang immediately to mind.
I took a bit longer deciding to collaborate with composer Richard Danielpour on “A Standing Witness,” only because the project was so massive. I knew it would take the better part of a year to write a dozen or more poems highlighting about sixty years of contemporary American history. But images and lines kept floating up, resulting in a truncated villanelle to mourn the 1968 assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and an abecedarian for the AIDS crisis, so I dove in headfirst, with trepidations in tow.
Commissions are a one kind of challenge, and collaborations yet another. Collaborations are exciting, a chance to open one’s imagination to other genres. When I was asked to propose poetry to complement the interior architect’s design of twelve marble chairs encircling the lobby of the Sacramento Federal Courthouse, I faced the challenge of not only fitting poems onto the stone backs of those chairs but also imagining those words in concert with the flow of people walking through the lobby. The arrangement of the chairs meant that I would have no control over when the poems might be noticed, and hence no way to indicate where any individual poem began or ended, which led me to explore new conceptual takes on the brief lyrical outburst.
Years later, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., tendered a variation on this idea. The Folger had been undergoing renovations at the time, and I was invited to write a poem to serve as a ribbon of text etched along the marble berm leading visitors from the gardens to the new main entrance. They gave me plenty of time, and I enjoyed my back-and-forth with the Folger people immensely.
Collaborations with composers, however, are my special delight. Because of my musical background, I can readily comprehend how to translate the mood of a baritone versus a mezzo-soprano, or how a phrase can span lines in poetry as well as measures of music. For me, if a commission involves a collaborative process, the collaboration is more likely to lead to discoveries on the page than the commission itself.
CD: “Ode to my Right Knee” in Playlist for the Apocalypse abounds with addictive sonic echoes and an irresistible sense of play. The poem begins with these lines:
Oh, obstreperous one, ornery outside of ordinary
protocols; paramilitary probie par
excellence: Every evidence
you yield yells.
Readers encounter the following entry about “Ode to my Right Knee” in the “Notes” section of the book: “Challenged by my students to assign myself a poetry exercise as wild as the ones I’d given them, this is what I came up with: Write a poem in which each line is dedicated to a different letter of the alphabet—that is, the line must use only words starting with that letter.” What are some assignments you’ve given your students, involving various forms of constraint, that you have found useful in helping them push their work in new directions?
RD: I call these personalized writing exercises “wild cards,” and I warn my students that their targeted assignment may come to them any time of day and at any point during the semester, just as an event in life can ambush us when we least expect it. I can’t give you specific examples without violating the trust of my students, since each assignment is confidential and can be revealed to others only by the student, should they so desire. The exercises are designed to invade recipients’ comfort zones, to nudge—sometimes shove!—them into unfamiliar or at least different territory. I approach these wild cards as if sending the recipients on a mission or a quest, and along that journey they’ll encounter rules and requirements—so many, in fact, that I fully expect them to throw up their hands in exasperation and mutter, “Oh to hell with it. This is impossible!”
Once the initial self-consciousness has been tossed aside, ideally something opens up inside of the student, leading to either a spectacular failure or a beautiful success, and it doesn’t matter which. Students have generated dioramas, lab experiments, recipes, dialogues involving talking foxes, and poems scratched on a Perrier bottle because that was the one item found in the rubble of the virtual dystopian universe I had asked them to imagine. Some “wild card” assignments have arrived in parts, one envelope per week, and others in a single lumpy package, tied with string. But almost all have surprised and delighted both their student creator and me.
CD: Continuing a discussion of your approach to teaching, you have taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where you are now Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. What are some of the most common flaws that you observe in the work of beginning poets, and what are some approaches you take as a teacher to help them improve in those areas? Conversely, what are some qualities that tend to jump out at you when you find yourself excited by the work of a beginning poet?
RD: The most common weakness is not understanding or paying attention to the many ways in which the language itself can shape a scene. They’ll opt for the direct confessional mode while expressing little desire to revisit the initial draft. They regard silence—the white space at the end of a line, the unsaid thought expressed by a dash—as something they can ignore.
The remedy depends upon each student’s particular obsession. I usually try to direct them to published poets who grapple with similar, though not identical, topics. It’s rarely productive to confront a heartbroken student with a poem about the same kind of heartbreak. Tit-for-tat responses can make students feel that the subject has been explored already, so they have no hope of doing any better. I also try to get them to dig into the details of an event, without commenting on the event itself. For instance, I may ask: What color exactly was the lover’s shirt? How many buttons did he fasten? Was it creased from the bed or wrinkle-free? If there was a collar, how did he straighten it? I want them to learn how to find solace, and even inspiration, in the deeper details.
What can excite me in the work of a beginning poet is what I call “the spark,” which isn’t expertise at crafting a line, but rather the frisson of a detail that feels totally new and yet absolutely right—for instance, the image of a sunrise yawning over the horizon.
CD: One of the most memorable aspects of Playlist for the Apocalypse is the book’s final section, titled “Little Book of Woe,” in which you explore your experience with physical illness. You were diagnosed with MS a number of years ago, and Playlist for the Apocalypse marks the first time you’ve published poems about the disease’s impact on your life. It is especially striking how well you capture the experience of physical pain, which can be enormously difficult to convey in language. Would you talk about what it has been like to engage with MS in such an intensive way in your poetry, and are there any particular writers or literary works that have acted as guideposts for you when it comes to writing about illness?
RD: When students are dealing with a sensitive subject that may either impact others or change fundamentally the way others see them, I tell them: You have a choice about whether you allow the poem to be seen and read by others. You may, however, have little choice whether you write it in the first place. If some malady, disaster, or emotional turmoil haunts you to the extent that you cannot put it aside, you may have no choice but to tackle it.
This certainly was the choice I faced when diagnosed with MS. After the initial shock and dismay came a helplessness, bordering on panic, as I dealt with my symptoms, which were rough and unpredictable—a fire raging in my left calf that no ice could cool, feet that were warm to the touch but felt to me like frozen clumps, and the experience of coming suddenly to a standstill and failing to will my legs across the room. Even before undergoing pharmaceutical treatment, I began to write down the details of how my body felt, first as a means of describing the various nerve sensations to my doctors, and eventually in an attempt to describe them to myself. Poetry is what I do, a way of illuminating the inexpressible, and the very act of searching for words that could encompass—and hopefully sometimes pinpoint—those scary neurological glitches was a balm.
I didn’t seek out other poets that have dealt with illness in their work, which was a conscious decision. I needed to find my own words, in my own way.
CD: What are some of the topics, literary works, cultural figures, or craft-related matters that are currently obsessing you as a poet, and can you share a bit about what you’re working on right now?
RD: My writing process relies heavily on thwarting my over-active super-ego, so I try to keep myself in the dark. I routinely find myself working on several pieces in the same evening, the hopeless-looking fragments scattered across my desk, with no idea which one, if any, will finally coalesce. I try to maintain some level of non-awareness. All I can confidently say is that at the moment I’m not working on a book-length sequence like Thomas and Beulah or Sonata Mulattica. Individual poems seem to be the soup du jour, and a memoir that’s rapidly becoming a non-memoir. I can’t explain what that is, because I don’t know myself yet, but I look forward to finding out what the Muse, the details, and the language—its singing and its silences—have to say. That’s the way I like it!
CD: Thank you for taking the time to converse with us about your most recent poetry collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, your thoughts on poetry’s changing cultural presence, your experience navigating the writing life following your MS diagnosis, and much more. As you continue generating new poems, we look forward to discovering along with you what the “singing” and “silences” of your language will reveal.