Lamont Poet Rita Dove Dazzles Audience
Courtesy of University of Iowa
By Sophie Ma ‘24
On Feb. 22, award-winning Lamont Poet Rita Dove graced the Academy with a reading of her latest poetry collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse.
Dove is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and educator who is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. She is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts and possesses 29 honorary doctorates to date. Dove also served as the US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005 to 2011.
Dove’s Playlist for the Apocalypse (W.W. Norton, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. The Boston Globe also described it to be “a piercing, unflinching new volume [that] offers necessary music for our tumultuous present” from “perhaps the best public poet we have.”
“She brings poetry into every room. She heard the music in us and in our poems, even when we could not. She heard it in our panic and our questions, our scrambled syntax and furrowed brows. She heard it in the big moments…and small details.”
In her reading in the Academy’s Assembly Hall, Dove selected poems from various sections of her collection, including but not limited to “Prose in a Small Space,” “Girls on the Town, 1946,” “Naji, 14, Philadelphia,” “The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude,” “Beside the Golden Door,” “World-Wide Welcome,” “The Angry Odes: An Introduction,” and “Shakespeare Doesn’t Care.” Between poems, Dove naturally wove in stories about her students, mother, daughter, and memories of the pandemic, among other tales and anecdotes. At one point, she was joined by former student and George Bennett Fellow Raisa Tolchinsky for a reading of “Declaration of Interdependence,” during which the two alternated lines in an engaging and rich dialogue.
In Tolchinsky’s introduction of Dove, she praised Dove’s ability to capture a multitude of emotions and experiences in her poetry — to grasp the essence of life in words. Tolchinsky also reminisced about her days as Dove’s student at the University of Virginia.
“She brings poetry into every room,” Tolchinsky said. “She heard the music in us and in our poems, even when we could not. She heard it in our panic and our questions, our scrambled syntax and furrowed brows. She heard it in the big moments…and small details.”
“She heard the music so clearly and raised it up so that you couldn’t help but eventually hear it too,” Tolchinsky continued. “Sitting in a room with her, you knew you mattered.”
Explaining the title of her collection, Dove sought to redefine the meaning of “apocalypse.” Of the term, she said, “It’s not merely destruction and death. It’s also revelation. It’s having something be revealed to you that is so momentous that it changes the world as you know it. Whether you decide to make that a dystopian universe or whether you decide to go into it and change it is something that all of us have to do.”
Dove also compared our current times to an apocalypse.
After the reading, Dove answered a few questions from the audience, exploring her use of Greek mythology in her poetry, her creative process, how she deals with writer’s block, and what she defines as a good poem.
In response to the question about what defines good poetry, Dove said, “I am constantly being surprised by poems. Just as there are so many different dialects and stories in life and even languages, I find that the way that I write a poem is just one way. There are a lot of others.”
Nevertheless, Dove left the audience with one metric. “In the writing of a poem or in the reading of a poem that reaches beyond the merely kind-of okay, the self disappears entirely,” she said. “Even if it’s about something that is very personal…when you read it, time falls away and you fall away. You become larger than the body that you carry.”
The reading concluded with much applause and was followed by a book signing.
