Rita Dove's poems Contents Introduction

Chapter II. About Rita Dove's poems and image analysis
2.1. About Rita Dove's poems
“Shape the lips to an o, say a. / That’s island”: So begins the last poem in Rita Dove’s debut collection, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). The poem starts with the architecture of the body—the mouth piecing together familiar shapes to make way in foreign terrain—and opens onto a meditation about the potential of precise language to reroute unfolding history. At once grounded in the body and extending across space and time, the exacting and ambitious “Ö”—and the collection that contains it—heralded a new voice in American literature.
Across eight collections, Dove (b. 1952) has created a poetic landscape that claims the intimacy of history, dismantling facile binaries of good and bad, inside and outside. Her oeuvre unites lyric and narrative traditions. For example, her third book, Thomas and Beulah (1986)—which won the Pulitzer Prize—imaginatively renders the story of her maternal grandparents, making sensory and immediate the Great Migration and the industrial landscape of 1920s Ohio. Alongside members of her own family, Dove’s wide-flung engagements include Persephone, Rosa Parks, eighteenth-century African-American scientist Benjamin Banneker, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and many others. Inflected by abiding interests in African-American history, German language and literature, classical music, and ballroom dancing, Dove’s work comprises a world all its own that brings readers back to what we know with new eyes. 
Dove’s literary accomplishments extend beyond poetry. She is the author of a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); a play, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994); and many significant essays, some of which are collected in The Poet’s World (1995). She also has written lyrics for several composers, including John Williams. 
Beyond her own vast literary work, Dove has formatively shaped the world of contemporary American poetry. Appointed US Poet Laureate in 1993, she transformed the position into one of advocacy and outreach, bringing poetry to spaces varying from schools to hospitals. More recently, she edited the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011), which, in the words of poet and scholar Evie Shockley, is “illuminated to the point of burning”—drawing widespread critical attention that generated a crucial and ongoing dialogue about the increasing diversity of the American poetic canon.
Dove has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including some twenty-five honorary doctorates, the National Humanities Medal, the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, a Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. 
For our 2015 interview, we met in Professor Dove’s office, where photographs and ephemera evoke some of her many artistic collaborations. Summer had begun to draw people outdoors with its endless distractions, but inside, Dove was wholly present—turning over each question, offering profound insights.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.