Rita Dove's poems Contents Introduction

Claire Schwartz: In May 2015, you gave a stunning reading at the Museum of Modern Art as one of ten African-American poets who wrote in response to Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series. How did you come to that project?
Rita Dove: Elizabeth Alexander—who’s an old, dear friend—had asked if I would be one of the writers to respond. I must say, I don’t normally like to do commissions. They go against my creative impulse. Also, the idea of ekphrastic poetry—I have trouble with that as well. My gut response is, If the art was great, why would you even mess with it?
But this was Jacob Lawrence, whose work is amazing and very stylized. There’s an essence of the scene, and, because his rendering’s not a simple description, any response to it can’t be a simple description. I had seen some of the panels from Migration before, but I had never seen the entire collection. They sent me the color reproductions of the panels, and I was so moved that I thought, Certainly I can do something as a tribute to this masterpiece.
So, this project became not merely a response to the Lawrence panels but also a communion of souls across genres and across history, an incredible outpouring of artistic empathy saying, Yes, I understand this, even now, in this day and age. 
In your poetry collections Museum, Sonata Mulattica, and On the Bus with Rosa Parks, you engage other art forms as well as take on the life of historical figures. How do you decide to do this?
The trigger at the beginning of trying to write a poem—any reaction to, or communion with another work of art—is some “ping” inside of me that resonates beyond genre. That was the case, for instance, with [the 1929 German painting] Agosta the Winged-Man and Rasha the Black Dove. I encountered the double portrait face-to-face in the museum. I knew nothing about the artist at that point, but I came around a corner and there they were, this incredible pairing—Agosta the Winged-Man and Rasha the Black Dove— staring back at me. I was still reluctant to write anything about the portrait until I did a lot of research on the artist, Christian Schad, because what I was interested in poetically was less the final product—what’s already been done and done beautifully—and more what was behind it, the whole process. For me that poem is not a description of the portrait; it is about an artist seeking common ground with his subject as well as a meditation on being “exotic,” being thought of as “other.”
That theme runs throughout my work. I think of George Augustus Polgreen Bridge-tower a biracial violinist who at age nine performed for Thomas Jefferson in Paris] and the whole of Sonata Mulattica, which of course is also playing against the existing facts. I’m not after the actual artifact. I’m after what swirls around that artifact—all of the preconceptions that inform it. 
One thing I’ve never wanted to be, and try to make sure that I’m not, is what I would call a “historical tourist.” I don’t want to be looking around for something interesting to make a poem out of. That should not be the impulse behind a poem. That’s not why you do it. You do it because it haunts you, and you write to discover what it has new to say to you.