Arnold Rampersad, "The Poems of Rita Dove."

For the past few years Afro-American poetry has been in a state of inactivity not unlike a deep slumber. Ten or fifteen years ago, black poets stood so very close to the center of the movement for civil rights and black power that they seemed almost to defy W. H. Auden's celebrated lament that poetry makes nothing happen. Then, slowly but steadily, much of the air went out of their practice of the genre. Although the times are hard for all black artists, the losses in this particular area have far exceeded the rate of attrition, so to speak, in fiction or even in drama- for all of the many onerous demands of the stage. Not only is one hard pressed to come up with the name of a black poet of any consequence today who did not first make his or her reputation during the late sixties and very early seventies, it is also very difficult to assert that any of the poets of that period have grown as poets  in any remarkable way since then. Although writers such as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Mari Evans have continued to be effective and influential, no poet, as far as I can tell, has built on his or her beginnings in the late sixties in anything like the way that Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and David Bradley, for example, have built on their own starts in fiction during the same period.

If one looks at male  poets, as a separate category, the contrast is perhaps even more severe and puzzling. Unlike the leading role and the plentiful number of male poets, such as Amiri Baraka, Don L. Lee, and Etheridge Knight, at the height of the movement, impressive young black male poets seem to have all but disappeared from the scene. There are exceptions, of course- but my sense is of a particular dearth of black men as poets today; it seems to be almost unfashionable now to be both a black male and a poet. However, the weak performance by young male writers is probably only a token of the general decline in the art of verse in recent years within black culture, especially as compared with what has happened in fiction.

Now, on the other hand, with the consistently accomplished work of thirty-three year old Rita Dove, there is at least one clear sign if not of a coming renaissance of poetry, then at least of the emergence of an unusually strong new figure who might provide leadership by brilliant example. Thus far, Rita Dove has produced a remarkable record of publications in a wide range of respected poetry and other literary journals. Two books of verse, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) and Museum (1983), have appeared from Carnegie-Mellon University Press. A third book-length manuscript of poetry, "Thomas and Beulah," is scheduled to be published early in 1986 by the same house. Clearly Rita Dove has both the energy and the sense of professionalism required to lead other writers. Most importantly- even a first reading of her two books makes it clear that she also possesses the talent to do so. Dove is surely one of the three or four most gifted young black American poets to appear since LeRoi Jones ambled with deceptive nonchalance onto the scene in the late nineteen fifties, and perhaps the most disciplined and technically accomplished black poet to arrive since Gwendolyn Brooks began her remarkable career in the nineteen forties.

These references to the sixties and early seventies are pointed. Rita Dove's work shows a keen awareness of this period- but mainly as a point of radical departure for her in the development of her own aesthetic. In many ways, her poems are exactly the opposite of those that have come to be considered quintessentially black verse in recent years. Instead of looseness of structure, one finds in her poems remarkably tight control; instead of a reliance on reckless inspiration, one recognizes discipline and practice, and long, taxing hours in competitive university poetry workshops and in her study; instead of a range of reference limited to personal confession, one finds personal reference disciplined by a measuring of distance and a prizing of objectivity; instead of an obsession with the theme of race, one finds an eagerness, perhaps even an anxiety, to transcend- if not actually to repudiate- black cultural nationalism in the name of a more inclusive sensibility. Hers is a brilliant mind, reinforced by what appears to be very wide reading, that seeks for itself the widest possible play, an ever expanding range of reference, the most acute distinctions, and the most subtle shadings of meaning.

In what I take to be Dove's determination to break new ground and set fresh standards in relation to the black writers of the half-generation before her, there are some dangers. The most subtle of these she may not have completely avoided: some of her work seems to have been conceived and written, however unconsciously at times, in a spirit of reaction. This is almost to be expected, since Dove must be acutely aware of herself as a poetic reformer, one with great potential as a leader, even if she hardly ever condescends to expose her indignations. One must assume, however, that her hostility to the "black arts" tradition is at least in part behind her astonishing poem "Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream," from The Yellow House on the Corner:

... Moments slip by like worms.
"Seven years ago..." he begins; but
I cut him off: "Those years are gone-
What is there now?" He starts to cry; his eyeballs

Burst into flame. I can see caviar
Imbedded like buckshot between his teeth.
His hair falls out in clumps of burned-out wire.
The music grows like branches in the wind.

I lie down, chuckling as the grass curls around me.
He can only stand, fists clenched, and weep
Tears of iodine, while the singers float away,
Rustling on brown paper wings.

Dreaming or awake, Dove in her art certainly confronts Lee in his own once dominating, or domineering, version of the poet's role. Her opposition may be couched in this poem in highly personal terms (neutralized by the idea that the perception of Lee here is in a dream), but it is in fact mainly philosophic. Dove sees poetry, its dignity, nature, and functions, in a way quite different from most of the writers who came just before her. These writers sometimes used poems the way a Jacobin mob used cobblestones- because there was nothing more destructive at hand. Not so Dove, who clearly comes to verse with a profound respect and love, and an appropriate solicitude for its tradition and future. For some people, such an approach is hopelessly retrograde; for Dove, I suspect, it is as necessary as life itself.

As a poet, Dove is well aware of black history. One of the five sections of The Yellow House  is devoted entirely to poems on the theme of slavery and freedom. These pieces are inspired by nameless but strongly representative victims of the "peculiar institution," as well as by more famous heroic figures (who may be seen as fellow black writers, most of them) such as Solomon Northrup, abducted out of Northern freedom on a visit to Washington ("I remember how the window rattled with each report. / Then the wine, like a pink lake, tipped. / I was lifted- the sky swivelled, clicked into place"), and the revolutionary David Walker ("Compass needles, / eloquent as tuning forks, shivered, pointing north. / Evenings, the ceiling fan sputtered like a second pulse. / Oh Heaven! I am full!! I can hardly move my pen!!!").  In these works and others such as "Banneker" in the later volume, Museum,  Dove shows both a willingness and a fine ability to evoke, through deft vignettes, the psychological terror of slavery. She is certainly adept at recreating graphically the starched idioms of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at breathing life into the monumental or sometimes only arthritic rhythms of that vanished and yet still echoing age. Her poems in this style and area are hardly less moving than those of Robert Hayden, who made the period poem (the period being slavery) virtually his own invention among black poets. Dove's special empathy as a historical poet seems to be with the most sensitive, most eloquent blacks, individuals of ductile intelligence made neurotic by pain, especially the pain of not being understood and of not being able to express themselves. The scientist Benjamin Banneker:

What did he do except lie
under a pear tree, wrapped in
a great cloak, and meditate
on the heavenly bodies?
Venerable, the good people of Baltimore
whispered, shocked and more than
a little afraid. After all it was said
he took to strong drink.
Why else would he stay out
under the stars all night
and why hadn't he married?

But who would want him! Neither
Ethiopian nor English, neither
lucky nor crazy, a capacious bird
humming as he penned in his mind
another inflamed letter
to President Jefferson- he imagined
the reply- polite, rhetorical...

Dove writes few poems about racism today. One might say that she apparently declines to dwell on the links between past history and present history. Sensitive to the demands of her art, she perhaps is wary of what she perceives as the trap set by race for the black writer. She writes of black experience, but mainly in the course of "ordinary" things- where a given human situation is recognizably black but not defined even in part by the tension that many of us see as ever-present between the races. The situations she describes that involve blacks are almost always very close to the poet's private experience, part of her personal and family history; both inside and outside of this tight little circle there is little sense of racial identification even in the objective sense of the term. Such meagerness of racial feeling may have curious, even dubious roots- a question that surfaces disturbingly when one searches for the final meaning of a poem such as "Nigger Song: An Odyssey":

We six pile in, the engine churning ink:
We ride into the night.
Past factories, past graveyards
And the broken eyes of windows, we ride
Into the gray-green nigger night.

We sweep past excavation sites: the pits
Of gravel gleam like mounds of ice.
Weeds clutch at the wheels;
We laugh and swerve away, veering
Into the black entrails of the earth,
The green smoke sizzling on our tongues...
In the nigger night, thick with the smell of cabbages,
Nothing can catch us.
Laughter spills like gin from glasses,
And "yeah" we whisper, "yeah"
We croon, "yeah."

Further complicating the matter are poems that indicate that Dove, who sometimes poetically masks herself as a shy, withdrawing spirit, knows something about rage inspired by political and social injustice. "Parsley," the last poem in Museum,  is a chilling evocation of the madness that led General Trujillo allegedly to order the massacre of thousands of Haitian blacks in the Dominican Republic apparently because they could not pronounce the letter "r" in perejil,  the Spanish word for "parsley." The Haitians speak, to open the poem:

There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp the cane appears

To haunt us, and we cut it down. El General
searches for a word; he is all the world
there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,

we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green. We cannot speak an R-...

As a theme in verse, Dove seems to say, indignation at social injustice has a place but one that should not be too prominent; racial  indignation must be even more discreet. Indignation tends to destroy art itself, she apparently believes, especially black art; a confrontation with racism appears to open the world but often only opens a void that gapes deceitfully between the poet and her possession of the wide world. Dove wishes nothing less than possession of that wide world; she longs for the complete freedom of her imagination:

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open

and above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they've intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.

"The house expands"- but Dove's expansions begin, as they should, with the familiar. The reader can easily be distracted by the many sophisticated or even arcane references in The Yellow House on the Corner  and Museum  from seeing the extent to which the poet, for all her ambition, breathes an affection for the homely and the familiar that is signalled in the title of her first book before being countered (as if on purpose, in fear of too much familiarity?) in the title of her second. I referred earlier to the mask of a shy, withdrawing spirit she sometimes wears; nevertheless, that spirit ("My heart, shy mulatto," as she puts it in one place when she writes of her adolescence), as a transcended part of her psychological history, remains authentic in its way. Many of her most affecting poems take us back to those years when romantic doubt, intimidation by the complex newness of life, and a survivor's gift for fantasy stepped in spontaneously between emotion and calm intelligence. So uncompromising is Dove's later, adult intelligence that we cling to some of these "softer" poems in relief.

In The Yellow House,  one finds "A Suite for Augustus" and the three-part "Adolescence" grounding the larger work and then sanctioning Dove's more ambitious flights; the same is true for the beautiful section "My Father's Telescope" in Museum.  "A Suite for Augustus" sketches the passage of years between a knob-kneed virginity and the arrival of womanhood, between nervous black adolescences, male and female, and the final "making" of the cool world. With deft wordplay, an excellent dramatic sense, and a sure ability to choose just the right fragment of experience and expose it to precisely the correct amount of light, Dove takes us- within the space of relatively few lines- on a historical tour of a sensibility. The suite opens with "1963":

That winter I stopped loving the President
And loved his dying. He smiled
From his frame on the chifferobe
And watched as I reined in each day
Using buttons for rosary beads.

Then tap water rinsed orange through my underwear.
You moved away...

Adolescent waywardness, its haunted, quixotic eye and self-absorbed, self-caressing languor of temperament, merge gradually with the will towards monumentality of a gifted, ambitious persona who eventfully will look back mainly to help her chart the way ahead. Unafraid of temporary obscurity, of the surreal half-note, but always seeking finally the representation of clear vision, Dove moves stylishly from effect to effect. "Planning the Perfect Evening":

... Stardust. The band folds up
resolutely, with plum-dark faces.
The night still chirps. Sixteen cars

caravan to Georgia for a terrace,
beer and tacos. Even this far south
a thin blue ice shackles the moon,
and I'm happy my glass sizzles with stars.
How far away the world! And how hulking
you are, my dear, my sweet black bear!

As a poet, Dove loathes sentimentality; she is so hypersensitive to false sweetness that her work will sometimes seem far too demanding to the reader who takes honey with his poetry. Perhaps this general principle, as much as anything else, also explains her tough-minded attitude to race. Certainly she is only modestly sentimental about her own past; she insists on looking back with dancing irony and a disciplined will to understand, and not simply evoke or indulge. Dove's aim in her evocations of her past, her "roots," is a glistening but really scrubbed and unvarnished remembrance of lost time. "Grape Sherbet," from "My Father's Telescope":

The day? Memorial.
After the grill
Dad appears with his masterpiece-
swirled snow, gelled light.
We cheer. The recipe's
a secret and he fights
a smile, his cap turned up
so the bib resembles a duck.
. . . . . . . .
Everyone agrees- it's wonderful!
It's just how we imagined lavender
would taste. The diabetic grandmother
stares from the porch,
a torch of pure refusal...

Dove insists on a more austere governance of intimacy than many poets, and most people, are willing to concede. Even when she looks back with affection on the memory of growing up with her father, her manner is one of mock chastisement. The stars are not  far apart, as he had taught her. No; with passing time

... houses
shrivel, un-lost,

and porches sag;
neighbors phone

to report cracks
in the cellar floor,

roots of the willow
coming up. Stars

speak to a child.
The past

is silent ....

Between father and daughter, now man and grown woman, "Outer space is / inconceivably / intimate."

As much as she values home, Dove ranges widely as writer; it is an essential part of her commission to herself as a poet. Europe, as the prime example, is a neighboring field to be mastered like the field of home. The composer Robert Schumann, a German woman who has lost her man in war and lives thereafter crazed by grief ("She went inside, / fed the parakeet, / broke its neck"), the age-old science and mystery and ritual of making champagne- Rita Dove sees everywhere a continuity of human experience. Africa and Asia come more lightly within her frame of reference, but nowhere is she a perfect stranger. The past, too, for her is everything in human history of which she can be made aware, not least of all in the antiquity of Europe and Asia, or the Middle Ages. Dove's approach is neither panoramic nor political; still less is it for cultural genuflection. Cerebral, skeptical, and yet at the same time intensely human, she looks on the wide world and the fallen centuries with the same essentially ironic consciousness, the same shrewd intelligence that does not absolutely forbid love, but conditions it, that marks the recreation of her own private past. "Catherine of Alexandria" memorializes a celebrated would-be martyr of the early Christian church:

Deprived of learning and
the chance to travel,
No wonder sainthood
came as a voice

In your bed-
and what went on
each night was fit
for nobody's ears

but Jesus'. His
breath of a lily.
His spiraling
pain. Each morning

the nightshirt bunched
above your waist-
a kept promise,
a ring of milk.

Dove's imaginative flights are tacked down again and again by homey details: "the woolens stacked on cedar / shelves back home in your / father's shop," in "Catherine of Siena"; the "two bronze jugs, worth more / than a family pays in taxes / for the privilege to stay / alive, a year, together," in "Tou Wan Speaks To Her Husband, Liu Sheng." On the patina of dust obscuring the humanity of the past from our eyes Rita Dove quietly traces a finger. She writes in a colloquial, familiar idiom that subdues the glittering exotic and makes the ultimate effect of most of these "foreign" poems to be nothing less than a documentation of her claim to the whole world as her home.

The absence of strain in her voice, and the almost uncanny sense of peace and grace that infuses this wide-ranging poetry, suggest that Dove has already reached her mature, natural stride as a poet. I suspect that this judgement might be premature in itself. Both volumes are so tightly controlled, so guarded against excess, that some readers may find them in certain places- perhaps even as a totality- too closely crafted, too reserved, for unqualified appreciation. I think that what we may have in these two books- although they already outclass the complete works of many other poets, and virtually all black poets of Dove's generation- is in fact only the beginning of a major career. In which direction will Dove's great talent take her? I believe that, paradoxically for someone so determined to be a world citizen, she may yet gain her greatest strength by returning to some place closer to her old neighborhood.

Very carefully, I do not say her "home"- much less her "real home" or her "true home." Such terms, made shabby by the hucksters, are millstones to a poet like Dove; for her, a house is not necessarily a home. In the end, she may yet as a poet redefine for all of us what "home" means. Dove herself would probably benefit in her own way as an artist from this active redefinition. Then one should perhaps see in her work a loosening of rhythms and a greater willingness to surrender to improvisational and other gifts that she has kept in check but certainly earned the right to indulge. I would expect a vision growing more and more- again paradoxically- into narrower focus and consistency, with the emphasis shifting from irony and learning and calm intelligence towards the celebrations of the more wayward energy that springs naturally out of human circumstance.