photo by Fred Viebahn
Words Speak At just 10 years old, Rita Dove decided she was going to read the biggest books on the bookshelf in her Akron house — a two-volume set by William Shakespeare. She wasn’t daunted because her parents always encouraged her.
“They didn’t say, That’s too hard. They said, You’re reading — great! They left me to figure it out for myself,” recalls the now-70-year-old acclaimed poet. “They instilled in us a respect for reading. You enter into it with openness.”
She also read Louis Untermeyer’s “The Golden Treasury of Poetry” and began writing poetry herself but never shared her writing. She played the cello, was a majorette and read lyrical works, like Tennessee Williams’ plays — at a young age, she was developing the musicality that makes her writing famous. When Dove was a Buchtel High School 11th grader, her teacher, Margaret Oechsner, took some students to meet poet John Ciardi, and she realized becoming a writer was a possibility.
Dove’s accolades include a Pulitzer Prize for “Thomas and Beulah” about her Akron grandparents, a National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Arts and a position as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress — the first Black person and the youngest person to receive that honor.
Her 2021 collection, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” features groups of poems on topics like the passage of time, the concept of ghettos, the last 50-some years of life-changing moments in American history and Dove’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis.
Now the Henry Hoyns professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, Dove returns to Akron to see
family and attend her high school reunions. She is proud to call Akron her hometown.
“Akron is pretty much everywhere in my work. Living there was a privilege and a joy.
As the Rubber Capital of the World … the rest of the world had pieces of Akron.
I wanted to get at the way the American dream was channeled through Akron in my poems.
I composed [“Playlist for the Apocalypse”] to be read over time, just as over time each poem came to fit into the book. Like a playlist, you can feel like, I need a laugh today, so I’m going to stick with “Family Reunion” or “Shakespeare Doesn’t Care.” But you can also say, Today I’m angry and look at A Standing Witness, Angry Odes or dip into the ghetto poems and see how we trap ourselves and how we are trapped by others in our own biases. I’m hoping it can invigorate, appall and comfort.
Poetry saved me whenever it touched upon something that I thought no one else felt. … I felt like I needed to write those poems [about MS] to explore the ways in which chronic illness can affect a person’s life and how you can get through it.
It was a way of coping. … I had to learn to live with this disease — this was my personal apocalypse.
I really don’t believe poetry is something that belongs in the ivory tower, that you have to have a certain number of degrees to appreciate it.
I’m hoping my poetry is always accessible. It’s about human beings. It’s about life.
Poetry uses language to point out the silences behind the language. All the unsayable things we cannot figure out a way to articulate — poetry does.” — as told to Kelly Petryszyn
