Rita Dove's poems Contents Introduction

You’ve mentioned that before you allowed a green parrot into your poem “Parsley,” you needed to know that such a green parrot exists in the world.
If there are facts, I want to honor them. The facts are absolutely sacrosanct. They’re what got us there. Let’s take “Parsley.” I had the facts of that moment, but I had very little else. First, I corroborated that indeed Trujillo massacred 20,000 Haitian cane-workers because they couldn’t roll the “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley—and, of course, it had happened—then I checked the numbers. I was haunted; but only after I shook the notion that evil was a generic state of being was I able to start writing. Instead of thinking of evil as a force just blazing through, destroying things, I began to understand that evil could be creative, devious—that evil is human and, therefore, part of us. This is what was haunting me. This is what I needed to get behind. So, I opened myself up to possibility. And in that realm, I was completely free to imagine a scenario which humanizes evil, but also would explain why Trujillo chose that particular word, perejil, for his shibboleth.
In the midst of that imagined realm—who knows what Trujillo really thought? Or Beethoven, or Schad?—there are certain things which are absolute. Schad had to get to his studio; where was it located? If that street is really there, I just can’t plop it down on any old street. That’s the kind of detail that, for someone reading the poem who knows the facts, destroys your credibility completely. 
Trujillo’s parrot was totally imaginary—I didn’t know if he had a parrot or not—but it was not an act of imagination to describe that parrot accurately. In the process of writing, I got stuck because I had to make sure that a parrot with plumage the color of parsley actually existed. And when I found that Australian parrot, I didn’t just stick it in the poem. I thought, How could an Australian parrot end up here? Well, doesn’t that kind of extravagance befit a dictator? The parrot is also an exile. The general, too, has come so far from his roots, where the children all chew sugarcane. And part of that estrangement from his humanizing past has landed him with an Australian parrot. He’s come that far.