Research Guide to American Literature

In 1979 Dove married German-born writer Fred Viebahn, whom she met at
the University of Iowa; they have one daughter. Dove has traveled extensively in
Europe, and to Israel and Africa, and has taught at the University of Iowa, Tuske-
gee, and Arizona State University. She is currently Commonwealth Professor of
English at the University of Virginia. Dove is the second African American to be
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—for her third collection, Thomas and Beulah
(1986)—and the first to serve as poet laureate of the United States (from 1993 to
1995). She was also poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004
to 2006. In addition to these honors, Dove has been awarded a Guggenheim Fel-
lowship, a Walt Whitman award, the Lavan Younger Poets award, the National
Humanities Medal, and the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal.
Dove conceived her first collection, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980),
“as a very domestic title, but one on the edge of domesticity. I mean, the house
is on the corner. There’s a sense of something beyond that—outside of that
boundary there is something else” (interview with Helen Vendler). The descrip-
tion describes a hallmark of Dove’s poetic strategy in this and other collections:
the ability to move beyond the personal and immediate to other ways of under-
standing and seeing the world. Even semiautobiographical poems transcend
individual experience. The frequently anthologized “Adolescence—I” and
“Adolescence—II” delineate feelings of expectation common to all girls com-
ing of age, thus “refus[ing] any overt racial/cultural frames” (Malin Pereira). In
the historical poems that make up section three, Dove moves beyond being a
“consumer” or “tourist” of history by extending her imagination to understand
and empathize with those from other places and times. “Belinda’s Petition,”
“The House Slave,” “The Transport of Slaves from Maryland to Mississippi,”
and “Kentucky, 1833” deal with the trauma and history of American slavery.
In “David Walker (1785–1830)” Dove juxtaposes quotations from abolitionist
ideals expressed in Walker’s pamphlet Appeal in Four Articles (1829) with harsh
details from his life, the protest and disbelief he encounters when he insists
that “Men of colour... are also of sense.”
In her second full-length collection, Museum (1983), Dove also moves from
the personal to include “perspectives that cross history, cultures, genders, socio-
economic positions, races and ethnicities,” as Pereira notes. Functioning like a
museum, her poems allow a specific subject to come under scrutiny. Using fable,
legend, ekphrastic poetry (in which she responds to an artistic image), and objec-
tive musing, the collection explores the early classical Greeks, Saints Catherine
and Alexandria, Shakespeare, and the Cold War. In poems like “Why I Turned
Vegetarian” and “To Bed,” she presents autobiographical moments, while other
poems register the consciousness of historical personages. In “Parsley,” perhaps
Dove’s most famous poem, she presents Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the
Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, who ordered the massacre of some
thirty thousand Haitians for reasons seemingly both racist and ethnocentric:
the Francophone Haitians—unlike Trujillo’s mother, who “could roll an R like
a queen”—were unable to pronounce perejil, the Spanish word for parsley. The
poem, which ends the collection, warns against Trujillo’s dangerously narrow
vision, his inability to appreciate difference.

Rita Dove 219