Visit our companion site,
American Passages. Produced in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, this rich site includes an archive featuring over 3,000 images, audio clips, presentation software, and more.
Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.
Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.
Authors
Rita Dove (b. 1952)
« back to list of Authors
Dove has published seven volumes of poetry: The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), and American Smooth (2004). She has also published a collection of fiction, Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); and a valuable collection of essays, The Poet’s World (1995). Conversations with Rita Dove, edited by Earl G. Ingersol, appeared in 2003. Therese Steffen’s critical study Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama appeared in 2001; Malin Pereira’s Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism, in 2003; and Pat Righelato’s Understanding Rita Dove, in 2006.
Born in Akron, Ohio, Rita Dove was educated at Miami University of Ohio, the University of Iowa, and as a Fulbright/Hays fellow at the University of Tubingen, Germany. She was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. A lyrical, disciplined poet, Dove often explores the tension between difficult subject matter and controlled form in her work. In her collection Mother Love (1995), she examines contemporary mother-daughter relations in terms of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Other collections of poetry by Dove include The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), and Grace Notes (1989).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Rita Dove's term as poet laureate of the United States was testimony to her commitment to "poetry" in the broad sense of the term -- the full tradition of American verse and the diversity of voices within that tradition. The NAAL selections from Dove give us a strong sampling of the variety in her work, her experimentation with many personae, and her quest for escape, through her poetry, from the confines of the individual self.
1. The closing lines of Pomade (1986) include a declaration that "Nothing ever stops." Which of the Dove poems in this selection seem not to end or give the impression of action flowing onward beyond the last line of the poem? Compare three of those "non-stop" closings, and speculate about the thematic intention of each.
2. Banneker (1983) offers us a glimpse of Benjamin Banneker as a solitary old man, reflecting on his life and legacy. Describe the identity that emerges in this poem. What qualities distinguish Banneker here? What archetypes or myths are recalled by the final sight of Banneker, in the poem's last stanza? Why does the poem invoke these archetypes?
3. Poem in Which I Refuse Contemplation (1989) seems to refuse to follow several conventions. What are these conventions? How many different voices do you encounter in this poem? What are the effects of mixing them?
4. Heroes (1995) and Missing (1995) are both about missing daughters -- one from Greek mythology, the other from contemporary life. Compare the way that these poems engage with mortality and with fate. How do these poems resonate with other poems in the Dove selection in NAAL?
