Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson expressed the view that blacks were innately incapable of writing poetry because "their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination." He dismissed the work of Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American female poet, as "below the dignity of criticism." There is no evidence that the sage of Monticello had actually read Wheatley's poems before issuing his put-down. In fact, he misspelled her name...
...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...
...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...
...feels a deep intimacy with these people and their history. A similar sense of connection is what Dove hopes to bring to her new post. She believes she can make poetry seem less airy and irrelevant. "I think one of the things you have to do is show that poets are real people who write about real things," she says. "I'm hoping that by the end of my term people will think of a poet laureate as someone who's out there with her sleeves rolled up and working, not sitting in an ivory tower looking...
...hold you enough so that you're willing to live with it and work it out on your own," she says. "A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it." With Dove as poet laureate, Americans will get plenty of poetic sustenance...