Word: doves
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ceremony was "profoundly moving, not onlybecause of the circumstances of his period here atHarvard and the appropriateness of having himhonored in Memorial Church and with a bust inMemorial Hall," Dove said...
...fitting, then, that America's new poet laureate is Rita Dove, a black woman who calls herself a spiritual heir of Wheatley's, and whose verses appeal not only to the senses but also to the imagination and the intellect. Moreover, Dove does her work on Jefferson's own turf. She lives with her husband, German novelist Fred Viebahn, and their 10-year-old daughter Aviva on a wooded hillside near Charlottesville, Virginia, a 15-minute drive from Monticello. She teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded. And last week she made her public debut...
...what would Jefferson think of making Dove the nation's official voice of poetry? "I think he would be dismayed and say it was a political move, an affirmative-action thing," says Dove. "But then I don't really think of him as any great judge of poetry. He was dead wrong about Phillis. She had to deal with one of the dilemmas of the black artist that still exist today, that no matter what you do there's still this feeling that it's not good enough...
...with Dove, whose qualifications are beyond dispute, even though she satisfies all the demands of political correctness. At 40 Dove is the youngest person, second woman (after Mona Van Duyn) and first African-American to be chosen as poet laureate since the position was created eight years ago. "She was the absolutely perfect choice," says Gwendolyn Brooks, the only other black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. "She can be brightly irreverent, carefully humorous and mercilessly inclusive. She has it in her to become a great poet...
Unlike her British counterpart, who is expected to crank out disposable verses on such occasions as the birth of a member of the royal family, Dove is only required to deliver one public reading of her own work and organize appearances by other writers. Beyond that, her task is to promote poetry in whatever way she chooses...