A new book of poems byRitaDoveis always cause for celebration.
It's been awhile. AlthoughDovepublished a collection of her poems from 1974 to2004 in 2017, and edited the "Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry" in 2013. Her last book of new poetry, however,"Sonata Mulattica," was published in 2010.
Dove, 68, grew up in Akron and attended Miami University in Oxford. She received a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1987 for “Thomas and Beulah,” and was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 1993. She now teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.
Her richly rewarding new book, "Playlist for the Apocalypse," plays deeply disturbing poems about history and contemporary problems against delightful ones about lighter subjects.
The book includes, among others, a group of poems meditating on what “ghetto” has meant through the centuries, another group written from the point of view of a cricket, a poem constructed out the phrases used in advertisements for wigs, a set of poems that form the basis of a song cycle to be produced this fall, and a final set reflecting on her experience with multiple sclerosis, which began to affect her in 1997.
Dovespoke recently by phone from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Q: Tell me about the title and structure of the book.
Dove: I really conceived of the book as one the reader would use to accompany them through the apocalypse. We're in dire times now. It has a kind of mixtape sense to it, where each section has an arc and a rise and a fall. I wanted to start with the fact that you can look back, but you can also look forward, and things that happen in the past are, in a way, indications of what's happening today.
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After that, I felt it was comfortable to go through a very specific way in which time and history work with a section that deals with a ghetto, how a ghetto began with the concept of the word in Venice, all the way up through the concentration camps and our contemporary American ghetto and the ghetto that still exists inside people's heads in Black Lives Matter and all that. "A Standing Witness" is a series of droplets in the stream of history, for the last 50 or 60 years of this country. Then the last section, I deal with very personal struggles, with M.S. And that kind of fear of what happens if your very body becomes the battlefield.
Q: There have to be particular challenges in writing about pain and disease, in distancing yourself from it?
Dove: It is maybe one of the most challenging things to do to write about pain and disease without sounding as if you're whining or being absolutely gobsmacked by the enormity of it all. As a species, we are wired to forget the physical sensation of pain, which makes it really difficult to talk about pain, or to write about pain, and have someone empathize with it. It took a long while to write those poems. I've been writing them over the past 15 years or so. But I felt it was important to write about the ways in which one can try to overcome that most primal of fears, the fear of personal extinction and incapacitation.
Q: Tell me about collaborating on “A Standing Witness.”
Dove: That was such an amazing experience with Richard Danielpour. He actually approached me. He had done an opera with Toni Morrison, “Margaret Garner.” So he came with good credentials, put it that way. I liked his music. He had this idea of doing a song cycle. Because I'm musical, I play the cello, I've sung opera as an amateur, I could hear the register that he was planning. When he said mezzo, I thought, perfect. If he had said soprano, I probably would have said no. Mezzo, for this particular project, this idea of having these thumbnail reflections that encapsulate moments in time, in our history, it seemed to me a mezzo would have all the registers for that, both the soaring and the growl underneath.
First of all, we went through trying to pick out 10 or 12 moments since 1968, which was already difficult, but it was interesting as we worked through the decades how the trajectory formed. The song cycle was supposed to premiere last year at Tanglewood, but, of course, the pandemic messed that up, so it's going to premiere at the Kennedy Center in November.
Q: So have you heard them sung yet?
Dove: I have the whole score, but he also has sent me MP3 things, which don't have anyone singing the words, but are kind of electronically generated. You can't hear the difference between a string or a horn or a voice, but because I know music, I was listening to it with the score. It's going to be so great!
Q: You do a lot of playful experiments with form in the book. What is it that appeals to you about traditional forms, and playing with them?
Dove: If a form feels like a restriction, then you're going about it all wrong. A form is an invitation to find a way to express what you want to say, and work through the form to say it.
After I finished putting this book together and I looked at it, I thought wow, look at all the forms! I knew there were a lot of sonnets. I love playing with that form because I feel it's the perfect size to hand to someone, the perfect gobbet of sound.
The wig poem, that's a sonnet, too. I love the expressiveness that's used in advertising. It was so melodic, it became a rap, without me even noticing it.
The “Ode to My Right Knee” was a student saying, you have to give yourself a writing assignment, you always give us writing assignments. I thought, fair is fair. For that one, I came up with the assignment of having the words in a line start with the same consonant or vowel. Thinking about it, I thought, what hobbles along like that? Well, I'm living proof, because I have a bad knee!
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