~EDWARD BYRNE~
RITA
DOVE: AMERICAN SMOOTH
Rita Dove appears to have
blended the lyricism
which derives from her musical background
with a
fresh sense of movement and rhythm
within the poems that owes something
to her developed
interest and participation in dancing. The flow
of the lines in her poetry seems even more subtle,
more natural, and
more free than in past collections.
As the definition for the
book's title suggests,
there is a greater attention to imitating motion
that mirrors improvisation and allows individual
expression. The
eloquent language is accompanied
by elegant pacing across the page.
Past commentary on Rita
Dove's poetry has frequently, and correctly, focused upon its graceful
phrasing of language. As is often the case for others among our
best poets,
reviewers have pointed out the lyricism and musicality evident in her
carefully crafted lines, even in her more narrative poems.
Indeed, given Dove's history as a trained musician and singer, not to
mention the associations conveniently suggested by her last name, such
comparisons between verse and song, the metrical and the musical, in
her works have seemed even more natural parallels for critics to track
and spotlight.
In "The Black Dove," a chapter from Soul Says, Helen Vendler's 1995
book of criticism "on recent poetry," Vendler writes: "Technically, her
poems 'work' by their fierce concision and by an exceptional sense of
rhythmic pulse. (Dove used to play the cello, still plays the
viola da gamba, and is a trained singer.) No matter how powerful
her stories, no matter how sharp-edged her lines, her poems fall on the
ears with solace." Certainly, such a summary of Dove's poetic
style, with its appropriate tone complemented by her finely tuned
voice, provides an acute and accurate assessment for most of the poems
presented in the eight collections of poetry published over the last
twenty-five years by Rita Dove.
These characteristics could easily be seen in a
poem like "The Bird Frau," an example from Dove's first book, The Yellow House on the Corner
(1980), where readers are offered a quick description of a scene in
wartime Europe, "the sun losing altitude over France / as the
birds scared up from the fields, / a whirring curtain of
flak." Dove further uses her lyrical imagery to emphasize how the
pain felt by the woman in the poem is exhibited:
She
hung suet from the branches, the air quick
around her head
with tiny spastic machinery
—starlings,
finches—her head a crown of feathers.
She ate less,
grew lighter, air tunneling
through bone,
singing
a small song.
Beginning with this first book,
allusions to music or musical instruments and songbirds occur a number
of times throughout Rita Dove's poetry, as though creating an
accumulation of references for readers to trace from one collection to
another. In another instance in The
Yellow House on the Corner, Dove simply records "Notes from a
Tunisian Journal" in a series of vivid images:
The
nutmeg stick of a boy in loose trousers!
Little coffee pots in the coals, a
mint on the tongue.
The
camels stand in all their vague beauty—
at night they
fold up like pale accordians.
All
the hedges are singing with yellow birds!
A boy runs by
with lemons in his hands.
Food's perfume, breath is nourishment.
The stars
crumble, salt above eucalyptus fields.
In an endnote from the poem
"Parsley," one of the strongest works from Dove's second collection, Museum (1983), the poet reports:
"On October 2, 1937, Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961), dictator of the
Dominican Republic, ordered 20,000 blacks killed because they could not
pronounce the letter 'r' in perejil,
the Spanish word for parsley." In this poem, the dictator —
haunted by his
mother's death, as well as her voice carried on by a parrot — decides
the very sound of one's voice, and an inability to sing with a correct
inflection, would become an issue which determined each individual's
life
or death:
...the general sees the fields of sugar
cane, lashed by
rain and streaming.
He sees his
mother's smile, the teeth
gnawed to
arrowheads. He hears
the Haitians
sing without R's
as they swing
the great machetes:
Katalina, they sing, Katalina,
mi madle, mi amol en muerte.
God knows
his mother was
no stupid woman; she
could roll an R
like a queen. Even
a parrot can
roll an R! In the bare room
the bright
feathers arch in a parody
of greenery, as
the last pale crumbs
disappear under
the blackened tongue.
Thomas
and Beulah, Dove's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection that
loosely explores the lives of her grandparents in a pair of poetry
sequences, portrays Thomas's need to express himself through music, as
in "Variation on Pain" from the Thomas half of the book titled
"Mandolin":
He
lay on the bunk, mandolin
In his
arms. Two strings
For each note
and seventeen
Frets; ridged
sound
Humming beneath
calloused
Fingertips.
In a later poem from Beulah's
sequence, titled "Canary in Bloom," in the same collection, the
grandmother is depicted placing a
canary's cage on the front porch of "The House on Bishop Street," as if
a greeting to the outside world and an introduction to the lives
within the home, with "strangers calling / from the street Ma'am, your bird / shore can sing!"
"Recovery," a lovely poem near the end of the book brings together the
two principals in this long marriage, this couple who have shared a
life:
He's
tucked his feet into corduroy scuffs
and gone out on
the porch. From the parlor
with its glassed
butterflies, the mandolin on the wall,
she can see one
bare heel bobbing.
Years
ago he had promised to take her to Chicago.
He was lovely
then, a pigeon
whose pulse
could be seen when the moment
was perfectly
still. In the house
the
dark rises and whirrs like a loom.
She stands by
the davenport,
obedient among
her trinkets,
secrets like
birdsong in the air.
In a 1989 interview with Steven
Schneider that first appeared in Iowa
Review, Rita Dove acknowledges that some sections of a few
poems in this collection meant to imitate lyrics to Southern music are
invented songs: "I made them up. They are in the spirit of the
country blues. They are also influenced by spirituals and
gospels." Dove recounts how she wrote the collection of
poems with an influence of music, especially blues recordings: "When I
was writing this book I was playing a lot of music, everything from
Lightnin' Hopkins to older ones like Larry Jackson or some of the
recordings that Al Lomax made of musicians, all the way up to Billie
Holliday, stopping about the '50s. It seemed to be the music for
the book."
The year 1989 also saw publication of Dove's
next volume, Grace Notes, a
title that carries with it an obvious connection to music, those notes
not essential to the harmony or melody, but accents added as
embellishments that evoke emotion or eloquently emphasize a lyrical
moment. One particularly elegant passage occurs in "Dedication,"
a poem written "after Czeslaw
Milosz":
Once there was a hill
thick with red maples
and a small brook
emerging from black briars.
There was quiet: no wind
to snatch the cries of birds flung
above
where I sat and didn't know you yet.
What are music or books
if not ways
to trap us in rumors? The
freedom of fine cages!
With the first few lines of "Summit
Beach, 1921," the opening poem of Grace
Notes, Dove sets the musical tone: "The negro Beach jumped to
the twitch / of an oil drum tattoo and a mandolin, / sweaters flying
off the finest brown shoulders / this side of the world."
However, the young female subject of the poem cannot join the
dancing because she is recovering from a knee injury ("the scar
on her knee winking / with the evening chill"). She is
restrained from participating and follows her papa's advice,
"don't be so fast, / you're all you've got." Nevertheless, she
believes "when the right man smiled it would be / music skittering up
her calf / like a chuckle." The poem closes with an inpressive
image of a premature leap toward freedom and a childhood desire to fly:
. . .
She could feel
the breeze in
her ears like water,
like the air as
a child when
she climbed
Papa's shed and stepped off
the tin roof
into blue,
with
her parasol and invisible wings.
The final poem of Grace Notes is a work that appears
to perfectly complement the opening with images of contrast. In
"Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem" the perspective of a more mature woman, a
poet, is presented. ("So you wrote a few poems. The horned
/ thumbnail hooked into an ear doesn't care. / The gray underwear
wadded over a belt says So what.") Her view is not one of such
optimism or anticipation witnessed at the beginning of the book;
instead, there is a sense of regret or resignation:
Valley settlements put on their lights
like armor;
there's finch chit and my sandal's
inconsequential
crunch.
Everyone waiting here was once in love.
When Rita Dove wrote the poems for
her next collection, Mother Love,
a volume of poetry mostly concerned with the relationships between
mothers and daughters, and with a backdrop of the mythical story of
Demeter and Persephone, she had been reading Rilke's Sonnets of Orpheus, and she adapted
the sonnet form for much of the new book. As the name for the
form implies and Dove reminds the reader in the book's foreword, each
fourteen-line poem is a little song, tightly organized even when
unrhymed and dependent upon lyricism for its impact. The
musicality of the sonnet style seemed perfect for the priority of sound
Dove wanted to produce in her poems. Dove also reports that
"sonnets seemed the proper mode for most of this work" because "the
Demeter/Persephone cycle of betrayal and regeneration is ideally suited
for this form since all three — mother-goddess, daughter-consort and
poet — are struggling to sing in their chains."
In a 1998 interview conducted by Malin
Pereira and published in the Summer 1999 issue of Contemporary Literature (also
reprinted along with other interviews cited here, as well as a
number of additional interviews Dove has given over the years, in Conversations with Rita Dove,
edited by Earl G. Ingersol and published in 2003 by University Press of
Mississippi), Dove states:
I
believe that language sings, has its own music,
and I'm very
conscious of the way something sounds,
and that goes
from a lyric poem all the way to an essay
or to the novel,
that it has a structure of sound which I
think of more in
symphonic terms for larger pieces. I
really do think
that sonnets to me are like art songs.
That's one
thing. I also think that resolution of notes,
the way that a
chord will resolve itself, is something
that applies to
my poems—the way that, if it works,
the last line of
the poem, or the last word, will resolve
something that's
been hanging for a while. And I
think musical
structure affects even how the poems
are ordered in a
book. Each of the poems plays a role:
sometimes it's an instrument,
sometimes several
of them are a
section, and it all comes together
that way too.
By the time Rita Dove had written
her seventh collection of poetry, On
the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), any notion that her poetry was
influenced by the musical background she had experienced had been
repeatedly confirmed, and her poems continued to exhibit lyrical
expression. When interviewed by Robert McDowell for The Darker Face of the Earth
(2001), published by Story Line Press, Dove responded to a
question about musical influence on her work: "I grew up with all kinds
of music — blues and jazz and popular R&B. I have been
actively involved in music since the age of ten, when I began playing
the cello. Playing chamber music taught me the cadences of fugues
and the power of harmony. I believe my poetry reflects an
intensive relationship to the music of the spoken word."
An interesting metaphoric example of the
connection between music and Dove's process as a poet can be seen in
"The Musician Talks about Process" from On the Bus with Rosa Parks. The
musician central to this poem is Anthony "Spoons" Pough, and the
speaker confides an ability to accompany anything he comes upon that
pulses to a beat, no matter how simple or ordinary, and especially
those rhythms of nature with which humans align themselves through song
and melody:
I can
play to anything;
a dripping
faucet,
a tambourine,
fish shining in
a creek.
A
funny thing:
When my
grandfather died,
every creature
sang.
And when the men
went out
to get him, they
kept singing.
They sung for
two days,
all the birds,
all the animals.
Two and a half decades since the
publication of her first book, music remains a constant presence in
Rita Dove's work; yet, the evolution of Dove's poetry continues to
reflect an enlightenment and enrichment brought about by a willingness
for technical exploration and an openness to life
experiences. Although not a writer one would usually characterize
as experimental, Dove has consistently employed different forms,
including the villanelle and the sonnet, and personae, such as those in
the slave
monologues and the narratives of her grandparents, in her poetry
throughout the years. In addition to poetry, she has written a
novel, Through the Ivory Gate
(1992), and a verse drama, The
Darker Face of the Earth (1994), as well as a song cycle, Seven for Luck (1998), which was
written to music by John Williams. She also served two terms as
Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995.
However, according to recent news reports, a
devastating event that helped shape the direction of Rita Dove's latest
book of poems, American Smooth,
happened in 1998 when her home was
struck by lightning. She and
her husband, German novelist Fred Viebahn, escaped the fire that
followed and destroyed their house. Among the items on Dove's
list of things to accomplish and to lift her spirits as she was forced
to start anew was to commit herself to a newly discovered desire for
learning ballroom dancing.
The title of the new collection, American Smooth, is explained in a
prefatory note: "A form of ballroom dancing derived from the
traditional
Standard dances (e.g., Waltz, Fox Trot, Tango), in which the partners
are free to release each other from the closed embrace and dance
without any physical contact, thus permitting improvisation and
individual expression." A number of the poems draw their titles
from dance as well, such as "Fox Trot Fridays," "Ta Ta Cha Cha,"
"American Smooth," "Samba Summer," "Rhumba," "Bolero," or even "The
Seven Veils
of Salomé."
In this new book, Rita Dove appears to have
blended the lyricism which derives from her musical background with a
fresh sense of movement and rhythm within the poems that owes something
to her developed interest and participation in dancing. The flow
of the lines in her poetry seems even more subtle, more natural, and
more free than in past collections. As the definition for the
book's title suggests, there is a greater attention to imitating motion
that mirrors improvisation and allows individual expression. The
eloquent language is accompanied by elegant pacing across the page.
An extreme example, "Rhumba," is
designed with lines that alternate left margin flush and right margin
flush, as well as plain text and italics. The separation of white
space between the alternating lines, along with the feeling of
independence presented by the two voices in the poem, and the rocking
back and forth motion one seems to sense when reading the poem appear
to mimic the movement of dance partners across a ballroom floor,
combining the drama of opposition with the gracefulness of
synchronization. At the same time, "Fox Trot Fridays" shows a
softer and smoother movement through the poem that imitates the milder
steps of dancers escaping from their difficulties one day each week
through the soothing therapy of mellow music and dance:
Thank
the stars there's a day
each week to
tuck in
the
grief, lift your pearls, and
stride brush
stride
quick-quick with a
heel-ball-toe. Smooth
as
Nat King Cole's
slow satin smile,
easy
as taking
one day at a
time. . . .
The wonderful title poem of the
collection continues this mood. The speaker reveals her thoughts
about the precision of execution necessary to dance with energy and yet
give the audience an impression of ease: "such perfect agony / one
learns to smile through, / ecstatic mimicry / being the sine qua non / of American
Smooth." The dancer is so absorbed into the dance, so distracted
by her conscious efforts to make not only the correct steps, but also
all the proper body and facial movements, that she suddenly realizes
she'd forgotten her partner's presence:
I
didn't notice
how still you'd
become until
we had done it
(for two
measures?
four?)—achieved
flight,
the swift and
serene
magnificence,
before the earth
remembered who
we were
and brought us
down.
"Bolero" attempts to imitate the
movement of the dance and the rhythm of the music through the use of
three-line stanzas, each with an overly long first line followed by two
very short lines. The poem successfully contains language
evocative of the passionate relations between the man and the woman —
"a woman with hips who knows when to move them, / who holds nothing
back / but the hurt // she takes with her as she dips, grinds, then
rises sweetly into / his arms again."
Although the poems in this collection that
focus on dance as metaphor are delightful and innovative additions to
Rita Dove's oeuvre, perhaps the most significant and ambitious
contributions to Dove's repertoire are the poems contained in a section
of the book titled "Not Welcome Here," a series of historical poems
about African-American fighting men during World War I. An
endnote explaining this section offers the following history:
African-Americans clamoring to enlist for combat
during World War
I came up against the bulwark
of Race: The
American armed forces, segregated
and
intransigent, showed no trust in the combat-
worthiness of
the would-be soldiers, who languished
stateside until
the French, who knew no such
squeamishness,
asked for them. The celebrated
369th was the
first regiment to arrive; by war's end,
it had logged
the longest time in continuous combat
(191 days) and
received a staggering number of medals
(170 individual Croix de Guerre). It was also the
first regiment
to fight its way to the Rhine in 1918.
Even in this section, however, the
works begin with references to music and dance in the initial poem,
"The Castle Walk." The subject of the poem is James Reese Europe,
an African-American bandleader at the time of World War I who was hired
along with his orchestra to provide the music for Vernon and Irene
Castle,
the most famous dance team of the time and favorites of elite New York
City society. Conscious of the contrasts between the music the
band usually plays and the tastes of their uptown white audience, the
speaker confides how he chooses to dilute the music some:
. . . pour on
the
violins, insinuate
a little cello,
lay some grizzly
piano
under
that sweey jelly roll.
Our boys got a
snap and buzz
no one dancing
in
this gauze and tinsel
showroom knows
how
to hear . . . .
The reader is then informed of another contrast
which concerns the speaker, the carefree and careless atmosphere of the
upper-class socialites juxtaposed to the growing violence and evil of
war
across the ocean. Also, the ever-present gap between the black
and
white communities or cultures in the United States ("Those white folks
stalk / through privilege / just like they dance") parallels the
emerging gap between the self-absorbed wealthy elite secure in New York
and the endangered populations encountering a daily threat of death and
destruction in Europe ( "the old world's / torched"). Using the
collective "we," the speaker comments:
We
ain't nobody
special, but at least we know it:
Across the black
Atlantic,
they're
trampling up the map
into
a crazy quilt of rage
and honor; here,
the biggest news
going
would
be Irene and Vernon
teaching the
Castle Walk.
(Trot on,
Irene! Vernon, fake that
juke
joint slide.)
Near the end of this section, the
same main figure makes another appearance in a work titled "The Return
of Lieutenant James Reese Europe." In this poem, the bandleader
is directing his group of soldiers, just returned from war in Europe,
in a victory parade through New York City. This poem acts as a
perfect complement to the earlier one. In contrast to the safe
haven of upper-class society seen in the previous poem, the
African-American men in this poem have witnessed the effects of war and
been involved in entertaining completely different audiences, have
tried to
ameliorate the suffering of others:
We
toured devastation, American good will
in a forty-four
piece band. Dignitaries smiled; the wounded
settled back to
dream. That old woman in St. Nazaire
who tucked up
her skirts so she could "walk the dog."
German prisoners
tapping their feet as we went by.
This poem also exhibits a greater
sense of pride for what the men have endured and accomplished, as they
march straight through midtown New York ("stepping right up white-faced
Fifth Avenue") and on up toward Harlem performing music reminiscent of
where they have been, and displaying their war medals for all to see:
No
jazz for you: We'll play a brisk French march
and show our
ribbons, flash our Croix de Guerre
(yes, we learned
French, too) all the way
until we reach
110th Street and yes! take our turn
onto Lenox
Avenue and all those brown faces . . . .
The most extensive poem in this
section — indeed, the longest poem in the book — is "The Passage,"
which consists of nine parts, each a diary entry written between March
30 and April 7 of 1917 by an African-American soldier aboard ship
during his Atlantic crossing toward war in Europe. The soldier
and speaker in the poem ("Corporal Orval E. Peyton, 372nd Infantry,
93rd Division, A.E.F.") upon whose diaries and reminiscences the work
is based, was a friend of Rita Dove whom she first met in Tucson in
1987. The voice of the diary entries detailed in this poem is
effectively flat at times, recording ordinary moments in an
extraordinary time of history; yet, the content is often compelling and
contemplative: "This will be a day never to be forgotten"; "I am not
worried; I am anxious to go"; "When I think that I am a thousand miles
/ from land, in the middle of the Ocean, / I am not a bit impressed as
I imagined I would be. / Things have certainly changed"; "I wonder
where I'll be this time next year."
The poem's description of the soldiers' march
toward port for their journey overseas appears as an appropriate
precursor to the victory parade narrated in "The Return of Lieutenant
James Reese Europe," quoted above but placed later in the section:
. . . I looked back at
several hundred
men
marching toward
they knew not what.
When we passed
through the lower end of the city
a few colored
people
stood along the
street, watching.
One lady raised
her apron to wipe away a tear.
As the ship nears the coast of
France, approaches the horrors of the war ashore, a hospital ship is
passed and war news arrives nightly on the wireless. Peyton
writes in his diary of the mood on ship, a mixture of eagerness and
anxiety, and the strength the men drew from one another as they
anticipated the battles ahead:
. . . Ever since
supper
there has been a
bunch on deck laughing,
singing and
dancing. A large wave swept
over the planks
and drenched us all but
the stronger the
sea, the more noise we made.
At last, just as
Pickney had finished
a mock speech
with "I thank you, ladies and gentlemen,"
a larger wave
poured a foot of water on the deck.
The
sailors had crowded around us; they say
pity the Germans
when a bunch like us hit them.
In the last diary entry, after
services for a cook who has died on board, a sense of resignation and
resolve arises from the solitary reflections written, as well as a
feeling of relief that the ocean crossing is nearly over:
This
is an ideal Sunday afternoon:
I wonder what we
would be doing back home
if I was
there. Now I will read awhile
and then lie
down. I am tired of the voyage.
I suppose there
are lonesome days before me,
but no more so
than those that have already passed.
I can make
myself contented.
Once the soldiers have driven
inland toward the war and confront the violent realities of battle, the
images and language of Dove's poetry drifts adeptly to fit the shifting
moods. A powerful poem ("La Chapelle. 92nd Division. Ted.")
carries the date of September, 1918. Underneath its title the
poem opens ironically with an explanation that the "lonely beautiful
word / means church." The poem continues with a serene setting and
almost silent atmosphere, the town deserted except for a single
cow.
"La Guerre is asleep," and the soldiers experience a momentary pause,
provided unexpectedly, from the noise and destruction of the war:
. . .
it is quiet here; the stone
walls curve
like slow water.
When we arrived
the people were already gone,
green shutters
latched and stoops swept clean.
A cow lowed
through the village,
pushing into our
gloves her huge
sodden jaw.
However, even in this brief respite
soldiers are unable to escape their ever-present thoughts of war.
They are cognizant of the losses they have suffered, and they are
conscious of dangers that loom ahead. A delicate transition
deftly occurs in the poem's language, mood, and imagery:
Here, even the wind has edges.
Drizzle
splintered around us; we stood
on the arched
bridge and thought
for a moment of
the dead we had left
behind in the
valley, in the terrible noise.
The section's final poem, "Ripont,"
relates a visit by Rita Dove, her husband, and their baby daughter to
the
French battlefields of the 369th:
the
great war's Negro Soldiers
who it was said
fought like tigers
joking as the
shells fell around them
so that the
French told the Americans
Send us more
like these and they did and so
the Harlem
Hellfighters earned their stripes
in the War To
End All Wars
About three-quarters of a
century had passed since the war, and at first the quiet scenes in the
villages through which Dove drives seem eerily similar to those images
of the deserted town found by the soldiers in "La Chapelle. 92nd
Division. Ted."; though, the language in this poem is richer with vivid
description and a tone more identifiable as the poet's own voice.
She views pastures bisected by cow paths and hamlets: "noonday
silence dreary stone barns and a few / crooked houses cobblestones
boiling up / under our wheels the air thick with flies / the sky
streaked cream stirred in a cup." However, soon the family comes
upon a location that has remnants preserved from the way it had been
during the war:
This was the village
before that September
decades ago before victory ploughed
through
leaving her precocious seeds.
Past
the brambles the broken staves of
barbed wire
we could see a frayed doorway a
keystone
frame of a house gone a-kilter
like a child's smudged crayon drawing
They stop at a memorial site for one of
the battles where fallen soldiers of the 369th had been buried,
African-American soldiers alongside French. Mistaken for
descendents of the dead, Dove and her husband allow the crowd at the
memorial to believe this error as the people wave and the baby daughter
waves back. Dove confides finally that she could not write of
that day until only now, many years later, and for her daughter, as the
poem closes with a dedication — "for
Aviva, leaving home":
We kept on until twilight
stopped us
found an inn in a town not starred
on our map
where I sat in a room at a small
wooden table
by the side of our bed and wrote
nothing
for thirteen years not a word in my
notebook
until today
An unfortunate alignment in the
organization of this collection of poems positions a fairly weak
section titled "Twelve Chairs" immediately following the extremely
powerful "Not Welcome Here." In the endnotes, Dove describes
"Twelve Chairs" as a section in which "most of these pieces — some in
slightly different form — can be found carved on the backs of twelve
marble chairs in the lobby of the Federal Court House in Sacramento,
California as part of an installation by designer Larry
Kirkland."
In a profile of Rita Dove by Renee H. Shea
that appeared in the September/October 2004 issue of the magazine Poets & Writers, Dove clarifies
that the thirteen brief poems (twelve are titled for seated jurors and
one is
for an alternate) were commissioned for colaboration with an
architect, and she had to keep in mind the chairs around a table could
be read in any order rather than the sequence that appears in the pages
of the book. In the article, Dove explains the section's
placement as the third of five in the collection, that they were to
serve "as a fulcrum because [the collection] is all about our
particular, American brand of justice." Though the
rationalization for this section and its positioning sounds logical,
the very short poems come across as slight and ineffective, especially
when
compared to the cogent poetry in much of the rest of the collection.
For instance, "Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the
Coconut Grove" is a more convincing and forceful poem that appears in
the following section, "Blues in Half-Tones, 3/4 Time." Rita Dove
revisits in this piece a theme she has perfected in the past,
portraying an African-American icon, particularly a strong or
influential black woman. In an endnote, Dove reports: "Hattie
McDaniel was the first African-American to win an Oscar (Best Actress
in a Supporting Role) for her portrayal of Mammy in the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind."
This remarkable poem offers an introduction,
with exquisite imagery, to McDaniel in the magnificent first few lines,
as she enters "late, in aqua and ermine, gardenias / scaling her left
sleeve in a spasm of scent, / her gloves white, her smile chastened. .
. ." During the course of the poem, Dove not only describes
Hattie McDaniel's entrance — "striding into the ballroom / where no
black face has ever showed itself / except above a serving tray" — but
she also manages to encapsulate the lifetime of experiences and
relationships that have brought McDaniel to this moment on this
evening: "the little lady in Showboat
whose name / Bing forgot" or "the four husbands, the phantom /
pregnancy, your famous parties, your celebrated / ice box cake" or
"Your giggle above the red petticoat's rustle, / black girl and white
girl walking hand in hand / down the railroad tracks / in Kansas City,
six years old."
The poem slowly, surely, steadily leads up to the
moment of McDaniel's important entrance and a word of instruction from
the speaker, a
bit of advice perhaps for all, to savor this significant moment:
. . . Three million dishes,
a truckload of aprons and headrags
later, and here
you are: poised, between husbands
and factions, no corset wide enough
to hold you in, your huge face a
dark moon split
by that spontaneous smile—your
trademark,
your curse. No matter, Hattie:
It's a long beautiful walk
into that flower-smothered standing
ovation,
so go on
and make them wait.
With poems as strong as this one and
many others included in American
Smooth, Rita Dove continues to accumulate an impressive record
of poetry that examines her world and the worlds of others, past and
present, with insight and compassion. She once again brilliantly
explores even more closely themes or forms she has shown mastery over
before; yet, in this collection Dove also dares to discover new areas
of interest and additional poetic techniques that provide fresh subject
matter and novel presentations. At times, the works in American Smooth exhibit ambitious
and adventurous attempts at innovative style as well as a widening
historic scope that has marked Dove's poetry in the past with
distinction.
Much like the fox in "Quick" that is envied for its
"pure purpose / poured into flight," or the dancer in "American Smooth"
who feels she has temporarily "achieved flight, / that swift and
serene / magnificence," Rita Dove's words of poetry move gracefully and
sharply across the page with an elegant sense of purpose, one that
often elevates even subjects frequently overlooked as ordinary to a
higher level, until we realize, as the final lines in "Against Flight"
observe, we are "bare to the stars, buoyant in the sweet sink of
earth."
The experience of reading one of the fine
poems by Rita Dove in this book can be as thrilling as defying gravity
for just a short time, as if one had joined the leaping dancers in
their momentary and exhilarating suspension in air until, as the title
poem reminds in its closing lines, "the earth / remembered who we were
/ and brought us down." Fortunately, there are many potent poems
in this collection, each one allowing readers to leap again and again
with "just the sweep of Paradise / and the space of a song // to count
all the wonders in it" ["Fox Trot Fridays"].
As in a dance performed perfectly, in which
each partner
must do his or her part with exactly the right feel for the other's
presence, as well as an awareness about the presence of an audience
watching every step, in American
Smooth Rita Dove writes with a precise feel for the presence of
others, whether they be the array of subjects who populate her poetry —
some striding beside her and others independently moving through the
experiences central to their own lives — or the numerous readers whose
lives are enriched by following them line by line, foot by foot, and
one step after another.
Dove, Rita. American
Smooth.
New York, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. ISBN: 0-393-05987-1
$22.95
© by Edward Byrne
