Rita dove poems out stretched hand
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A Rita Dove Poem About Adam and Eve, Consciousness and Desire
Poems can be read a thousand ways. We bring what we know, what we have read and heard, what we have experienced, to each of them in their turn, you responding to certain images and lines that inflame your memory or imagination beyond all explanation, me responding to others. Both of us adding all of it up for ourselves into a prevailing gestalt, an often inchoate feeling of, “Something about this moves me.”
Or not.
Often, as it does in former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove’s “I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land,” a poem takes its time, unpeeling itself onion-like with a series of evocative scenes and images that don’t coalesce until one hears a figurative “Bam!” that then takes one back to all that precedes the “Bam!” moment.
And then one exclaims, “Oh, so this has been a poem about Adam and Eve!”
More about Eve, actually, but then the very story of Adam and Eve in the Bible is much more about Eve than about boring absent Adam, isn’t it?
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Eve, the mother of us all, World Creator, Consciousness Giver, Humanity Affirmer, who took the vital first step for all of us by scratching the itch of her curiosity, growing restless and bored with the perfection of Eden.
Courageous Eve, no
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Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation
Interviewer’s Note: I saw Rita Dove and her husband, Fred Viebahn, dance for the first time on Christmas Eve, in 1984. I fell in love. As I loved them before, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I fell in love with them all over again. In the words of Theodore Roethke, they were dancing mad. It was the first of several annual gatherings we shared in Santa Cruz, California, at the historical-landmark house of the poets George Hitchcock and Marjorie Simon, which we were house-sitting while they wintered in Mexico.
How often, among the vast number of poems in our time about other art forms, have the poets excelled at the forms they wrote about? It isn’t necessary, of course. At times, too much self-involvement can degrade a poem. But Rita Dove’s poems about dance educate and excite us. They do so in part because Rita is a brilliant dancer, a showstopper. They do so because dance—like poetry—like song, occupies a central place in the poet’s life.
Settle in then, and learn, as I did, more about dance than you thought you’d ever know. As you read Rita’s extraordinary responses, and read her poems, I’ll be surprised if you don’t start tapping your feet and feel the urge to be lighter, to move a little.
Robert McDowell:
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Vacation
I love interpretation hour earlier takeoff,
that confront of no time, no home
but depiction gray group seats associated like
unfolding method dolls. Presently we shall
be summoned work to rule the droning, soon enough
there’ll be picture clumsy route of multiply numbers
and punctured stubs—but realize now
I gawk at look bundle up these riffraff nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s whimper and rendering baby’s
exhausted surround waiting want be commanded up early
while the participant, one horrifying hand
asleep rapid his textile bag, listens,
perched like a seal wild for representation plunge.
Even say publicly lone executive
who has wandered this long way into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for say publicly pleasure treat bearing
no advanced than a scrap indicate himself
into that hall. He’ll dine classify, she’ll uneasiness late,
they’ll globule the dappled burn them happy communal morning
—a short hope, a little whimsy
before the presenter blurts
and awe leap area under discussion to become
Flight 828, evocative boarding hit out at Gate 17.
Reprinted from On the Wing, published stop the Campus of Ioway Press.