The Words of Poet Rita Dove Inspire Across Genres
Image via Fred Viebahn
Poet Rita Dove dances through genres. A former US Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and classically trained dancer, she has never let genre dictate her creativity, allowing herself the freedom to create where she pleases. “There’s no reason to subscribe authors to particular genres," she has written of her own work. "I’m a writer, and I write in the form that most suits what I want to say.” As a poet, she writes of everyday “sweetness” activities such as dancing with a loved one, to parsing through her identity as a Black woman in America.
Perhaps it is this freedom that makes her work, in turn, fertile ground for inspiration for artists of other genres as well. UChicago Presents hosts Rita Dove in a talk with Music from Copland House tonight, featuring discussion of the new song cycle A Standing Witness. Composed by Richard Danielpour, Dove has written thirteen new poems that provide the text for the cycle of thirteen songs in A Standing Witness.
Michael Boriskin, piano, Rita Dove, poet, Richard Danielpour, composer
Music from Copland House seeks to link America’s composers to their musical and cultural ancestry and to the wider worlds of literature, theater, painting, history, nature, and science. Dove is a natural fit for the the collaboration. Her poems range from describing the highs and lows of dance ("the audience / forget them") to the twisting path of growing up in "Adolescence II":
One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
The talk streams online on October 12 at 6:30pm and is free and open to the public. RSVP here. In the meantime, we've highlighted several audio recordings and a written piece of Dove's work, courtesy of poetry.org, below:
Adolescence II
Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.
Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,
One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,
Patting their sleek bodies with their hands.
"Well, maybe next time." And they rise,
Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight,
And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes
They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.
Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.From Selected Poems by Rita Dove.
Listen to “Weathering Out”
Listen to “The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude”
The "Music from Copland House" is the resident ensemble of Aaron Copland’s historic home in upstate New York. The work presents and reflects on pivotal moments in American history from 1968 to the present, and invites audiences to bring forth “the better angels of our nature,” in the words of President Lincoln.