Rita Dove: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1980, 1990s, 2000s, 2023]

I've been at the “business” of poetry for some time; I know that I'm considered more of a “non-militant” writer. As I get older, however, my patience wears thinner; I've grown weary of having to point out what should be obvious to anyone with sense and sensibility. I resent the complacent, singleminded arrogance of myopic “men of letters,” whose curious brand of good will perpetuates racist selectivity...I resent the presumption that their majority in numbers absolves them from paying attention to fair representation, leaving it up to those who have been “marginalized” to take note, tally the figures, and mount the protest. (What a waste of energy, emotion, enterprise! No wonder Ralph Ellison's invisible man gave up and went underground.)

-Rita Dove, “Letter to the Editor,” Poetry 2004

Rita Dove (1952–present) was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, Thomas and Beulah. Her Collected Poems 1974–2004 was a National Book Award finalist and an NAACP Image Award winner. From 1993 to 1995, Dove served as U.S. Poet Laureate. In 1996, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton, and in 2011, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. Dove is the only poet ever to receive both medals. She is a recipient of a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and has been recognized with 29 honorary doctorates to date.

In a Rita Dove poem every image is pinprick small, making for a stinging papercut that leads us to revelations as seductive as they are harrowing. ...

—from "Leading Us to Revelation: On Rita Dove," by Jericho Brown, published in Poetry, April 2023

Rita Dove's selected poems in order of publication

1980s

“The Breathing, the Endless News” (1989)

Receptacle
for wishes, each god is empty
without us

Mysterious and macabre, this poem’s world is as stark as the titular news. When nature appears, it is dead: the horn and hoof of an elk presumably hunted and piles of autumn leaves. A doll resembles but is not of the living. The only sign of life is children, “the trailings of gods,” like blood trails game or a doll drags on the carpet in a child’s hands. Though the children “fill slowly//with the myth of ourselves,” the filling seems as endless as news and not toward any development. The last line tells us that only dolls and gods grow here, not children; continuous killing strengthens them, like the endless violent news that we call a cycle.

1990s

“For Sophie Who'll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000” (1998)

No bright toy
this world we’ve left you…
Still, it’s all we have.

In this epistolary poem, the speaker addresses the titular Sophie through an extended metaphor in which Sophie’s inherited world is a toy that humanity has damaged, though the toy is not beyond repair. In three contained stanzas, the speaker moves from despair to hope. Stanza 2 imparts wisdom to Sophie to pay attention to even the broken parts of the world, to “study/its scratches” as much as where the world shines. The title suggests anticipation; this poem is written almost as a time capsule for Sophie, before the year 2000, before her formal education begins with the first grade. Anticipating a future affirms that future: there will still be a world for Sophie to love. While the first two stanzas end with periods, the dash of the third stanza and its imagistic gesture outward to nature enacts the title’s hope, leading to Sophie, the child, who, like a phoenix, can renew the broken world she rises from.

2000s

“I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land” (2002)

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else's chaos.

Although the title, taken from an Exodus verse, confirms it, Dove does not need to directly name the he and she of this poem to arrive at its Edenic reading. Though the former is “off cataloging the universe,” the she dwells in the sensorial, spending “whole days/touching, sniffing, tasting.” But paradise does not guarantee happiness; further in, the first line asks what happiness amounts to. Here, it is merely “exquisite/housekeeping,” a word that calls to the poem’s epigraph from a correspondence among Emily Dickinson and Louise and Frances Norcross in which Dickinson describes feeling debilitated by the overwhelming beauty of spring. Dove suggests that Eve’s action in the garden was not so much betrayal as simply another sensorial errand in a landscape in which “desire, the red heft of it” is Eve’s only daily companion.

“Reverie in Open Air”(2003)

I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.

In this poem, Dove’s speaker stands out not among people but amid nature, “out of sync with wasp and wren,” which can act “without purpose” in a kind of freedom from reason that the speaker can’t seem to inhabit. After the break in stanzas, which stretch like a lawn across the page, the speaker takes off her shoes, those “inappropriate clothes,” and, barefoot, can better access nature and “the primitive” part of her. The dash, a punctuation of movement, brings the speaker into her titular reverie, in which, drunk on “a tonic of absence,” she can stop trying to interpret nature and her place within it and simply participate in the surrounding world.

“Meditation at Fifty Yards, Moving Target” (2004)

Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it—
squeeze between heartbeats.
…
Soft, now: squeeze.

In this poem occurring in the moments before firing a gun, Dove stretches time by organizing this poem into sections, allowing for meditation—attention and presence—in a situation readers might at first presume is all impulse. Although the first stanza reminds us that a gun can kill a sleeping child, here, the bullet seeks “shelter” and the hand “repose”; pulling the trigger requires softness, and being shot is to be “plucked” like a feather. The final section of this poem, which acknowledges the “pleasure of heft” in firearms while also presenting their poetic names, Mossberg and Colts, follows its sympathies through, inhabiting the perspective of the bullet. Punctuation and capitalization disappear, and the pace quickens upon the gun’s firing as the bullet reciprocates the speaker’s efforts, finding its home in the body, as beautiful as the speaker finds the bullet.

From the Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

“Evening Constitutional” (2023)

No Significant Other?
Where’s your doggie, then?

Constitutional takes on dual valences in this poem, invoking constitutional rights while also being the noun that describes a regular nightly walk. The italics, too, create a dual valence, differentiating two voices. At first, the poem enacts a possible dialogue between two people in which the unitalicized voice responds to the italicized. But by the middle section’s italicized stretch, it is clear that although the form does create two distinct voices, they are both from one person: the italicized voice represents the said, the unitalicized represents the unsaid. “Patrol,” “premeditated,” and the detective images of the trench coat and the fedora add context to the scene: the Black speaker has been questioned by a (likely white) neighborhood watch-type while on a nightly stroll. The poem ends with yet another duality, “walking out/the kinks,” which recalls both solving problems and hair.

“LeaveTaking” (2023)

                   I kept watching          but the movie              began to dream

Although the title suggests a leave of absence or retirement from a professional career, the “leave” that plays out in the speaker’s daydreamed scene is from Earth and humanity itself via an extraterrestrial encounter. Within the dreamed scene, real interiority emerges as the speaker reflects on feeling estranged from humanity: “if I thought about it too long/I would be seen for what I was//but try too hard to blend in I might forget myself.” The stanza's descending tercets invoke a UFO coming down to Earth, and internal caesura enacts an absence, a "true shape" of "nothing at all." These gaps prevent a visual uniformity; each stanza is a stranger to its neighbor.

“Unaccompanied Anthem” (2023)

…Most often
I bore witness: I listened,
then took it back into a solitude
neither light nor rain
could reach.

An unaccompanied antecedent prior to the break, the this of the first line’s “I was not born to this” might be, after Joseph Conrad’s epigraph, aloneness, a certain kind of dream or life. Enjambment enacts the wariness declared in the second line, each line wrought as if it must stand on its own. “Swathed in rectitude” yet having to “rock [herself] warm” in solitude, with the lone hand raised against “a torrent of disregard,” the speaker points out that the labor undertaken by those who dream of justice is often an easy anthem sung—though surrounded by others—alone.