Rita Dove's poems Contents Introduction

You say that evil can be creative. Can evil be beautiful? 
It’s terrifying to think so, but it behooves us, I think, to realize that evil can, must, have a human face. And to have a human face means that all of the desires and the fears and the yearnings of, let’s say, a human soul can also be ascribed to someone who does horrible deeds. I’m not going to go so far as to say, “Evil can be beautiful,” but someone evil certainly can apprehend beauty and appreciate beauty, be moved by it; and then, in the next instant, destroy a human being. 
Right now, I’ve been working on some stuff for the Terezin Music Foundation. Terezin was the model concentration camp. The Nazis put it together so that when the Red Cross came, they could say, “Oh, everything looks fine.” There was bread, and there was music. A lot of composers and musicians were interned there, and they regularly gave concerts for the German officers. And then, periodically, these amazing composers and artists were sent off to a deadlier concentration camp. It’s haunting, this juxtaposition, this frisson, that arises when finer sensibilities and vulgar violence coexist in one human being. It’s something I don’t really want to consider, but it is there before us every damn day. It’s one of the driving forces of history, unfortunately.
When you say that you don’t want to be a tourist in history, how does that inform the ways you engage history? How, for example, does this work in Museum, whose titular concept certainly calls up tourism, at least on its surface?
Well, I think one way it’s different is that I don’t look for these things. I’m not looking for examples of oppression and exile with which to fill out a book called Museum—and, in fact, the title Museum came last. Come to think of it, with all of my books, even the ones which seem very themed, like Sonata Mulattica or Mother Love or Thomas and Beulah, I was far into the manuscript before I even realized there was a book. 
With Sonata Mulattica, althoughI had the facts of Bridgetower’s existence, I resisted the writing mightily. After Thomas and Beulah and On the Bus with Rosa Parks, I didn’t want people to think that all I do is write about historical characters. That was also why I just got the story out of the way in the first poem. I’m not interested in the facts per se; I’m interested in how different “difference” was in that time and place. Turns out it was complicated, not black and white at all. It’s never black and white. I entered those poems thinking, Let’s see what racism was like then. I was assuming that our racial mindset could be applied to their era. But it was totally different. I didn’t ask for these subjects; they were kind of thrust on me.
To be a historical tourist means to take a few snapshots of the surface of things. You’re only passing through. Then the reader, too, can say, “Oh, wow. Isn’t it terrible that that happened?” but not feel troubled by it; not feel, in some way, a participant in it. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that people call me a poet who writes about “the underside of history”—that phrase gets bantered about a lot. And that’s fine. But I never want to just take a few snapshots and get out. I never want to say, “Ooo, isn’t this exciting?” and then leave.
Interiority as alternative to a narrow definition of what black poetry can look like has been a poetic concern of yours from very early on. I’m thinking of “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee in a Dream.” Why do you turn to dream space when so much of your work claims in the waking those unlikely juxtapositions and sensations we attribute to dream space?
Well, as a young artist, I fretted and struggled against the Black Arts Movement. It’s not that I was opposed to it—it just wasn’t my movement. That is, I approached poetry differently. I was lucky to have come of age when I did; I don’t know what would have happened if I had been ten years older and had to write through that. The Black Arts Movement was the battering ram that first began to break down the bulwark of American artistic institutions. It’s necessary that blackness be part of the national conversation, but the Black Arts Movement’s insistence on projecting only certain aspects of black life was limiting if you wanted to talk about the complexity of being black or explore the negative spaces of racial identity—feelings of inferiority, beauty standards—this was sometimes shot down as being “not black enough” or “What do you want to do that for? That’ll only give them ammunition.” “Them” being the white establishment. So, for me the Black Arts Movement was artistically compromising. I was very young. It was my first book. I needed to take a stance and say, “This is not me.” 
On the other hand, I did not want that poem to be an unconditional confrontation. It’s almost more like the daughter breaking away from an overprotective family: “Let me be me!” That’s why I set the poem in a dream space: It was what one couldn’t say, what one didn’t want to say to the outside world, and yet still felt pushing up through the subconscious. In that space I could talk honestly with one of the heroes of the Black Arts Movement, someone whose work—when I was fifteen, sixteen—actually moved me deeply. But it wasn’t me.