are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass too quickly
out of breath. Don’t dwell on the grave which yawns for one and all.
Will you be buried in the yard? Sorry, it’s against the law. you can only
lie in an authorized plot but you won’t be there to know it, so why worry
about it? Here I am at my brother’s house in western New york: I came
here yesterday on the Empire State Express, eight hours of boredom on the train.
A pretty blonde child sat next to me for a while. She had a winning smile,
but I couldn’t talk to her, beyond, “What happened to
your shoes?” “I put them under the seat.” And
so she had. She pressed the button that released the seat back and sank
back like an old woman. Outside, the purple loosestrife bloomed in swathes
that turned the railway ditch and fields into a sunset-reflecting lake
And there was goldenrod and tattered Queen Anne’s lace and the noble Hudson
on which just one sailboat sailed, red, billowing, on a weekday afternoon.
A tug towed some scows. Sandy red earth and cows, the calves like
big dogs. With Fresca and ham and cheese on a roll the eight hours somehow passed.
My sister-in-law met me at the Buffalo Central Station and drove me out to their house.
Hilde is just back from a visit home to Augsburg, where she was born
not too long ago. She taught herself to speak English which she does extremely well.
My mother now lives with them in the house my brother built himself. She’s old: almost eighty-nine
and her sight is failing. She has little to do but sit and listen to the T.V. rumble.
When I came in she said, “I can’t see you but I know your voice.”
“Some corner of a garden where the soul sinks down under its own weight. ... ”
But this isn’t about my family, although I wish it were. My niece Peggy is at
camp in the Adirondacks so I am staying in her room. It’s essence of teenage
girl: soft lilac walls, colored photographs of rock stars, nosegays of artificial flowers,
signs on the door: This Room is a DISASTER AREA, and GARBAGEDUMP.
“Some ash can at the world’s end. . . .” But this is not my family’s story, nor
is it Molly’s: the coon hound pleading silently for table scraps. The temperature
last night dipped into the forties: a record for August 14th. There is a German
down pouff on the bed and I was glad to wriggle under it and sleep the sleep
of the just. Today is a perfection of blue: the leaves go “lisp” in the breeze.
I wish I were a better traveler; I love new places, the arrival in a station
after the ennui of a trip. On the train across the aisle from me there was a young couple.
He read while she stroked the flank of his chest in a circular motion, motherly,
covetous. They kissed. What is lovelier than young love? Will it only lead
to barren years of a sour marriage? They were perfect together. I wish
them well. This coffee is cold. The eighteen-cup pot, like most inventions,
doesn’t work so well. A few days: how to celebrate them? It’s today I want
to memorialize but how can I? What is there to it? Cold coffee and a
ham salad sandwich? A skinny peach tree holds no peaches. Molly howls
at the children who come to the door. What did they want? It’s the wrong
time of year for Girl Scout cookies.
Suggested Reading
New Poetry: Margaret Ross, Nora Claire Miller, and Richie Hofmann Recommend
By The Paris ReviewNew collections from Gabriel Palacios and Emily Jungmin Yoon—plus, a press for postcard poetry.
The Daily
The Review’s Review
The Art of Poetry No. 113
By Rita Dove
With her husband, Fred Viebahn, in Gummersbach, Germany, 1977. Courtesy of Rita Dove.
I first encountered Rita Dove in Essence magazine, where I learned that she’d won the 1987 Pulitzer for her book Thomas and Beulah (1986)—the first Black poet to be so awarded since Gwendolyn Brooks nearly four decades before. As a Black high schooler in Kansas who wrote poetry, or tried to, I distinctly remember wondering why no one had come to my door to inform me personally of this achievement—though I suppose the magazine, which then published poetry in its pages, had in fact done as much.
Thomas and Beulah was a revelation. Written in lines musical, freighted, and precise, Dove’s sequence of poems about her grandparents’ marriage is shadowed by the Great Migration, World War II, and the civil rights movement. That book’s grand theme—the intimacy of history—courses through Dove’s oeuvre, starting with her debut, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), and 1983’s Museum, a powerful collection that includes a poem called “Parsley,” which tells of the Dominican Republic leader Rafael Trujillo’s mass murder of Haitians on the pretext of “a single, beautiful word.” Dove’s ability to evoke a deadly dictator with irony and complexity is reminiscent of Milton’s sympathy for the devil in Paradise Lost or W. H. Auden’s damning “Epitaph on a Tyrant.”
Dove’s first four books of poetry appeared at three-year intervals, a pace that slowed only slightly with Mother Love (1995) and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). Both refract her experiences of parenthood—she and her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn, have a daughter, Aviva—and of serving as the United States poet laureate, a role she occupied from 1993 to 1995, and which she transformed from what was once simply called the consultant in poetry into the prominent position it is today. Those early volumes, intertwined much as Lucille Clifton’s are, add up to an everyday epic that tells of the ways that public history is created through private lives—especially Black ones, which is still a revolutionary idea. Along the way, Dove finds kin in a variety of figures: an unnamed “House Slave,” sideshow performers in Berlin, Billie Holiday and Hattie McDaniel, Persephone and Demeter, a trickster “Spring Cricket.” She has also written several proper epics, including the symphonic Sonata Mulattica (2009), about the violinist George Bridgetower, the original dedicatee of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and, in Dove’s reimagining, a nexus from which to examine music, memory, racism, and underappreciated talent. As she writes of Holiday: “If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”
In her poetry—and in her work as a playwright, novelist, short story writer, and editor—Dove considers what it means to be far from home as well as to feel at home. Her places are many: her native Akron, Ohio, but also Germany, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar and where Viebahn is from, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she’s taught for more than three decades. Our conversations, peppered with Dove’s knowing laughter, took place over three consecutive days, the first of them in the Library of Congress’s Poetry Room, which serves as the laureate’s office. It was a full-circle moment for Dove, who was that evening to receive the library’s 2022 lifetime achievement Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. At the ceremony, she read from the elegant, pointed poems in her most recent book, Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021), in which she first revealed having multiple sclerosis to her readers. Her sense of humor, never enough commented on, was in full force—as was her training both as an opera singer and, more recently, a ballroom dancer. Her carriage, as ever, was impeccable, her work woven through with jazz, with the pleasures and silences of language.
Given that she and her husband are both famous night owls who often work till dawn, our midday meetings, early for her, were particularly generous. We spent our next two days at the dining room table of her Charlottesville home, where, in 1998, a devastating fire destroyed many of her papers, which she had gathered in her attic with the intention of later placing in a university archive. It seems important to note that our discussion of memory and personal history took place in a town where Confederate monuments and violent racist marches have jeopardized our faith in the power of those very things.
From the Archive, Issue 243
Interview
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
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