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Rita Dove: Seventh, Youngest and First African American Poet Laureate of the U.S.

© Thadine Franciszkiewicz

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. She was a Presidential Scholar in 1970. She attended Miami University of Ohio, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree; she continued her education by earning a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa.

She is a poet, novelist, short story author, essayist, playwright, newspaper columnist and editor. She also created a song cycle for soprano and orchestra music. Despite the diversity, her literary excellence is honored over and over. Not the least of awards was the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for her book of poetry Thomas and Beulah. (http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/)
Rita Dove was the seventh, youngest and first African American to herald the position of Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 through 1995. Her poetry has earned her many awards and honors. Amongst these include the “Academy's Lavan Younger Poets Award, a Mellon Foundation grant, an NAACP Great American Artist award, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.” She also served as Consultant to the Poet Laureate of the United States during 2000. Currently Rita is a Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her family. http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prm...

Once a reader engages in reading Dove’s poetry, an initial observation is the poet’s unique ability to immediately imbed a stark emotional connection with a reader through an influx of bold imagery rooted in a grain of historical fact. Sometimes the fact is personal; other times the information is worldly. Once in awhile the details incorporate the politics of the spoken word.

The following excerpts from a poem exemplifies this last point successfully.

The Cane Field

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 cannopt speak an R---
out of the swamp, the cane appears

El General has found his word: perejil
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out of the swamp. The cane appears

The full poem can be read at the website: http://www.starve.org/teaching/intro-poe...

Critics have noted that "Parsley" is based on an historical event that occurred in the Dominican Republic in 1937. Rafael Trujillo, the dictator at the time, selected for execution twenty thousand Haitian blacks who worked side-by-side in the cane fields with Dominicans. Trujillo had all the cane workers pronounce perejil, Spanish for parsley.