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What does the vantage point of “lifetime achievement” look like for you?
The idea of receiving a lifetime-achievement award of any kind is actually very off-putting and frightening. It makes me feel like I’m dead, when I’m thinking, No, no. I’m just beginning! In 2016, Norton’s going to publish my collected poems, and that feels also like a tombstone. But I appreciate the wisdom of publishing a Collected, because I also realize there are a lot of young writers and readers who start their reading lists from the year when they come of age. They don’t read the earlier work, even though the earlier work was so essential to the later work. So, having it all in one volume makes a lot of sense.
Every time I sit down to write I try to feel that I’m starting over. It’s all new. It’s all fresh, and I’m learning as I go. I don’t want to do what I did before. I have to trust my inner artist who knows that there will always be sympathetic strings, and that I will pick up on them. I do know objectively that—even though I might feel terrified before a blank page every time—it’ll work out somehow. Maybe this poem won’t come off, but I don’t think of utter failure. Still, when I’m writing I find it actually counterproductive to imagine anything about my life.
Now, that’s my personal stance as an artist. But as someone who has become an inadvertent role model, I think it would be ungenerous not to acknowledge the power such recognition carries, and that my experience can be helpful to young writers.
I’m proud of what I’ve done. I didn’t imagine I would ever do any of it. I’m proud that, when the circumstances presented themselves, I stepped up to the plate, and I did all right. All I ever wanted to do was write the best damn poem that I could write—a poem that was true and honest and the very best I could write artistically, linguistically. And if that meant looking at the inner lives of two very ordinary people, that was what I did. At the time I was writing Thomas and Beulah, narrative poetry was not very in. I remember thinking, People are going to rake this over the coals. But I didn’t care. It was what I needed to do at that moment. And I try to keep that feeling whenever I’m writing. It’s helpful for younger writers to know that this is how we start out, and that the best thing you can do—really the biggest kind of success—is to feel that what you’re writing is what you want to write, what you need to write. If you can find some time and space in which to do that kind of work—hey, that’s the best. The rest of the stuff just gets in the way.
As we approach the end of April—National Poetry Month—I continue to marvel at how Amanda Gorman reinvigorated the country’s interest in poetry by blowing away viewers with her recitation of “The Hill We Climb” at the Biden/Harris Inauguration. That poem, published as a single volume by Penguin on March 30 has already sold nearly 250,00 copies, making it one of the fastest-selling poetry books in recent memory.
One of those who paved the way for Amanda Gorman and so many other emerging poets is Rita Dove, who in 1993 became, at age 40, the youngest U.S. Poet Laureate and the first Black poet to hold that position. (Gwendolyn Brooks had been named Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress in 1985.) In 1986, her collection Thomas and Beulah was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Dove, who also won an NAACP Image Award in 2017, has long used poetry as a form of activism and commentary. As fellow poet Brenda Shaughnessy once observed: “Dove is a master at transforming a public or historic element…unearthing the heartfelt, wildly original private thoughts such historic moments always contain.”
This August, Dove, who also teaches poetry at the University of Virginia, will publish a new collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse. In a conversation for Oprah Daily, I asked her why the form seems ever more urgent and relevant. She said this: “Before the pandemic, many of us used our homes essentially as stopovers on the way to and from work or going out. But now we have more time for contemplation. I also think we’re emerging from an era when language was being purposely subverted for political purposes—words were being taken over and made to mean something else, as in fake news. So we've been reminded of the power of words to oppress meaning or illuminate something in us. Now I think people have begun to yearn for a return to the use of language as a way of lifting us up.”
Dove also spoke to me about the young artists on the horizon she’s particularly excited about—she named Honorée Jeffers's The Age of Phillis as one of the new works she especially admires, along with recent collections by poets such as Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, and Victoria Chang, among others. And, of course, Amanda Gorman, about whom Dove said: “Wasn’t that fantastic? She mesmerized us all. She managed to make us feel like we were all of a piece, of one common humanity, and at the same time touch inside, so many of us, something very personal and interior. And she gave a performance. You have to perform an Inaugural Poem, which goes back to the roots of poetry when it was all oral and the poet was the griot, the person who told the tribe and the town, ‘This is our legacy. This is what we've done.’ And that's what she did. It's also so wonderful to see the excitement that has arisen because of her. All of these young people say, ‘Oh man, I didn't know a poet could do that. Okay, well, let me try this out.’”
How is it, I asked Dove, that a few simple words in the form of a poem can express a feeling we think is unique to us, can pierce our hearts and nourish our souls? “What a poet can do,” Dove said, “is to go into those areas where we feel very uncomfortable in terms of working out how we feel. And then we read a certain poem and we say, ‘Oh, someone else feels this way too.’ It’s like a tuning fork. The moment where you start to vibrate together--you and this person you don't even know but who has just read your soul--that moment of feeling no longer alone, knowing that what you are feeling is something someone else has felt, and that it will not overwhelm you. You are in alignment.”
"Is there a poem you would want to offer readers as they re-emerge from this Covid period," I asked Dove. "Yes," she said. And she sent me the glorious poem below, which is excerpted from her forthcoming collection. Pure joy.
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