(Kyle Dargan, Rita Dove) Sponsored by The Poetry Foundation. Rita Dove reads from her work. The reading is followed by a conversation with poet Kyle Dargan.

Published Date: July 27, 2011

Transcription

Moderator:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Denver, on Friday, April 9th, 2010. The recording features Steve Young, Kyle Dargan, and Rita Dove. Now you'll hear Steve Young provide an introduction.

Steve Young:

When she was appointed Poet Laureate in 1993, Rita Dove was the youngest person, and the first African American ever to receive that honor. She helped transform the Office of Laureate into one of advocacy and activism. During her two-year term, she gave frequent readings to audiences of all ages, and became a dynamic and eloquent spokesperson for the art. Her own poems speak for themselves, with great lyricism, vivid imagery, and musical phrases. I say, "Speak for themselves." Yet in them, we often find the poet inhabiting the lives of others, as in Thomas and Beulah, a series of poems loosely based on her grandparents' lives. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, making her just the second African American to win the award, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950.

Since then, she's published a collection of essays, averse drama, a book of short stories, a novel, and a half dozen volumes of poetry, including Grace Notes, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and her latest, out last year from Norton, Sonata Mulattica. This new book is perhaps her most ambitious to date, and brings together her unique gifts for character, drama, resonant rhythms, a keen feeling for vibrant, yet often overlooked voices. And above all, language that does not really tell history, but also quickens it with new life.

The Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Rita Dove has won more honors and distinctions than I have time to name. Perhaps I can borrow a gracious and understated stanza from her lovely poem, testimonial, to give you an idea of what her work has meant to so many. "Back when everything was still to come, luck leaked out everywhere. I gave my promise to the world, and the world followed me here." This afternoon, we are the world, and we have happily followed her here. Ms. Dove will be interviewed by the prize-winning poet and editor, Kyle Dargan, after the reading. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Rita Dove.

Rita Dove:

Thank you, Steve. And thanks to everyone here at AWP, who made this amazing conference roll, and it's quite a ride. So we're all hanging on, I'm as overwhelmed as you are, probably. It's wonderful to see that AWP has grown so, and that there are so many writers, editors, bookmakers that can fill up the Hyatt, and the other Hyatt, and a few other places along the way. So it's great to see you here, on a bright afternoon. I'm going to be taking you into the 18th and 19th century, so hold on. "If was at the beginning. If he had been older, if he hadn't been dark brown eyes ablaze and that remarkable face. If he had not been so gifted, so young, a genius with no time to grow up. If he hadn't grown up undistinguished to an obscure old age. If the peace had actually been as Kreutzer, exclaimed, unplayable. Even after our man had played it. And for years no one else was able to follow, so that the composer's fury would have raged for naught and wagging tongues could keep alive the original dedication from the title page he shredded.

Oh, if only Ludwig had been better looking or cleaner or real aristocrat, von, instead of the unexceptional van from some Dutch farmer. If his ears had not already begun to squeal and whistle, if he hadn't drunk his wine from lead cups, if he could have found true love, then the story might have held. In 1803, George Polgreen Bridgetower, son of Friedrich Augustus, the African prince. And Maria Anna Sovinki of Biala in Poland, traveled from London to Vienna, where he met the great master who would stop work on his third symphony to write a sonata for his new friend to premiere triumphantly on May 24th, whereupon the composer himself lept up from the piano to embrace his lunatic mulatto.

Who knows what would've followed? They might've palled around some, just a couple of wild and crazy guys strutting the town like rock stars, hitting the bars for a few beers, a few laughs, instead of falling out over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows. Then this bright skinned papa's boy could have sailed his 15-minute fame straight into the record books, where instead of a Regina Carter or Aaron Dworkin or Boyd Tinsley sprinkled here and there. We would find rafts of Black kids scratching out scales on their matchbox violins so that someday they might play the impossible. Beethoven's Sonata number nine and A Major, op. 47, also known as the Bridgetower."

Two centuries ago, the violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, son of a white mother and a self-styled African prince rose to his 15 minutes of fame. He might've become one of the most revered musicians and virtue roses of all time had he not crossed swords with his mentor, mercurial at best, Ludwig Von Beethoven. What's known today as the Kreutzer Sonata was originally dedicated to Beethoven's new friend, mulatto friend, who premiered it in Vienna in 1803, to white acclaim. And the ink was barely dry on the pages, the composer's pages, well, so far so good.

But then if only George had not decided to flirt with the same girl that Beethoven liked. He was only 23 years old, Beethoven about 10 years older. And if he had shown better judgment and not blatantly ogled the object of Ludwig's affections, perhaps we would've known more about him. It's a great cautionary tale, and it is true. This story that I'm going to be telling you, these poems that I'm going to be reading you are woven from historical events. And all the principal players have once lived real lives, from mad king George and his bend-thrift son, Prinny, who becomes George IV. Papa Haydn, Emperor Napoleon, Charlotte Papendiek, who was the wardrobe mistress to the Queen or the magnificent Black Billy Waters, who was a fiddler.

Even Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance. He did attend as a records show, he did attend one Bridgetower concert in Paris in 1789, a few months before the French Revolution rolled over the city. George was nine at the time and his father had taken him on the road when he discovered that his son had this musical talent and he thought, oh, there's money to be made here. And so he took him on the road. And one of their first stops, at least one of the first stops that we know about, is in 1789, at the famed concert Spirituality, which is a concert hall then. So you have this little boy rattling in a coach toward this concert. What doesn't happen?

"The notion that the carriage wheels clattering through Paris remind him of the drums from the islands in his father's tails. Clickclack sputterwhir, he could make a song of it. Dance this foreign hand down the cobbles of the rue du Bac as he balances his small weight against the pricking cushions, clacksputter whir, all the cadences jumbled together except the thudding dirge of his heart. That he can see in curtained twilight, the violin case in his lap twitch with every jounce, like an animal trapped under the hunter's eye. That he can sense down shrouded alleys danger rustling just as surely as he can feel springs, careless fingers feathering his chest and smell April's ferment in the stink of the pore marching toward him. Though none of this is true, he hears nothing but clatter. He can't see the rain slicked arc of the bridge passing under him as the pale stone of the palace rears up and he climbs down to be whisked into the Salle des Machines.

His father's cloak folded back like a bat's tucked wing, because it was a dry spring that year on the continent. Nonetheless, he ignores his heart's thudding and steps out onto the flickering stage, deep and treacherous as a lake still frozen at sunset, a glow with reflected light. Soon the music will take him across. He'll feel each string's ecstasy thrum in his head. And only then dare to open his eyes to gaze past the footlights at the rows of powdered curls. Let's see the toy bear jump his hoops nodding. Lorgnette's poised, not hearing, but judging. Except for that tall man on the aisle with hair, the orange of fading leaves. And two girls beside him. One, a younger composition in snow and embers. But the other, oh, the other, dark. Dark, yet warm as the violin's nut-brown sheen. Miraculous creature who fastens her solemn black gaze on the boy as if to say, you are what I am, what I long to be. So that he plays only for her and not her keepers. And when he is finally free to stare back, applause rippling over the ramparts. Even then she does not smile."

Now I'm not so sure about Sally Hemings attending the concert with Thomas Jefferson, but it was true that Jefferson did see one of his concerts. And I think Kyle and I will talk about this a little bit later, just that we know so little about this man, of this boy who became a man and became Beethoven's star premier person. But we noticed a little about him because the history books are just... They decided to cover him up, he didn't make it. And that's what fascinated me about the story at first. And I started with what I knew, which was just that he had premiered that concert and had to work my way backwards. So this book becomes as much a study about his life as it is about the ways in which fame changes people, the way in which it pushes you forward or not, and the ways in which people disappear.

On the way, a lot of people popped up. And I learned a lot about the ways in which musicians had to make their way in the 18th century and in the 19th century at that time. And basically you have to remember that there was no recorded music, so you could not download something from iTunes, if it was your favorite song. You got your music live, which meant that the musicians had to make sure that they were heard. His father that took him on the road and the idea was to try to find a patron who then would sponsor him at various concerts. And he decided, this father, that the best thing to do is to start at the top and try to go for royalty.

So he left taking George with him, he left Paris, went across the pond to England and started to stalk the Prince of Wales. Who was known at that time as being... He loved beautiful things. And people made fun of him because he loved beautiful things, he also loved good food. He was getting larger by the minute, he had gout. But he also wanted to create beauty. So he went down, George, they called him Prinny, short for Prince of Wales. And he went down to the seaside, in what is now Brighton. And decided to build this pleasure palace that he could go down, and it's a seaside cottage, so to speak. It's the Marine Pavilion in Brighton. If you've never seen it, go take a look at online, they're great pictures of it. It's the most amazing thing. It has a garden of spires on top, it looks like the Kremlin wedded to the Taj Mahal. Or maybe the baby of the Taj Mahal and the Kremlin. But it is in a very odd way beautiful. So in this poem, this is the Prince of Wales talking about the Marine Pavilion, which has become the laughing stock of England. The Marine Pavilion, Bright Helmston.

"More than a dream, more than longing, the banner of scent fading as you advance 50 years to completion, but always ahead by half a whiff, one blink of a weary eye, one tear's sting as the field brightens, blurs, oh, if only. More than all that, more than brocades, parabolic flashes and shadows, more than a lorgnette dangling from the perfect manicure. Saffrons burning filaments, shaken from a diminutive tube, wisps and whiskers, dream within a dream. Perhaps not even that. You need to imagine yourself larger than the country you occupy. You need to make others understand what you have glimpsed against the morning sky inside a nutshell, its singular beauty. The perforated towers like granite, lace, the roof, a garden of domes and spires, voluptuous riotous. Too extravagant for this fishing village, indeed, too extravagant for Britain.

But this is how lavish a spirit, a great nation must offer. Clouds, after all are more than bearers of rain. The infinite sea moves inside us, each more so placed on the tongue, awakens the perfumes and sediments of its origins. There can never be enough pleasure, to deny ourselves the prospect of ravishment is to be cursed to mesh, our pitiable path through existence to squeal when fed and bray when kicked. People feast upon this miracle, such beauty shining almost weightless above the net strewn encampments of the whelk eaters. This vision, a promise from your king to be proof that each of us bears inside a ruinous monumental love."

So to this prince, the father and son come, they land in Brighton. And the father has taken to dressing like... Well, not like an African prince, but what Britain imagined an African prince would look like. Which means every color imaginable, every fabric imaginable, as wide as possible. So in this poem, also brighten, the father is giving his son a lesson in how to dress for success. The Wardrobe Lesson.

"Everyone in this brine south village believes in African loves color. So let it be red for our promenade along the stein, with a splash of yellow to inflame their watery sensibilities. I think it's the sun they so yearn for. Blue saddens this close to the sea, though turquoise is beckoning. And emerald is best to hue entertained only in furnishings. True. We are props of a sort, let's not forget it yet. What an aspect will project unleashed among the masses. Against our darker palette, any color thrills. The main thing is fabric and plenty of it, clouds of silk, waves of damask to be cast off or furled neat to the chest with a certain sly emphasis. You'll learn these sophistications in time.

For now, it's enough to remember we are here to confound them, these wisent polyps crossing the sands in their creaking bathing machines. So bright sashes and billowing sleeves, rings on as many fingers as you dare, perhaps a turban or some other headdress to lend majesty without competing. The ladies adore a cape, different from a cloak. This you can wear inside where one brisk swirl will conjure a fable of perfumed trysts and moonlit sword play. As for the embroidered slippers, ungainly as they might seem, the upturned toes do not emasculate. Each step becomes necessarily deliberate. And so recalls the boudoir. Don't flinch, it won't do to ignore what waits behind each smile, that unvoiced sigh accompanying your every tremolo. Go ahead, examine those upturned faces in the concert hall, their tiny gasps and glistening cheeks. I've seen it, boy, even for one young as you. Ah, the ladies are always bored and lonely. You will not need a horse if you have a cape."

He was something else, he knew I think seven languages or so, or at least enough in those languages to seduce women. And they were noticed by the prince. And so what you have now is a 10-year-old boy going to London to play in the theaters there with his father dressed, both of them pretty outlandishly. And to go to the theater to play, they used to pass by a street musician. His name was Black Billy Waters and he had a peg leg and he was African and he played the fiddle as well. And that was the music for the masses. So they passed by Billy Waters whose pitch or his place, to gather money was in front of Adelphi Theater Theater. This is Black Billy Waters at his pitch.

"All men are beggars, white or Black, some worship gold, some peddle brass. My only house is on my back. I play my fiddle, I stay on track, give my peg leg, thank you, sire, a jolly thwack. All men are beggars, white or Black. And the plink of coin in my gunny sack is the bittersweet music in a life of lack. My only house is on my back. Was a soldier once, led a failed attack in that greener country for the union, Jack. All men are beggars, white or Black. Crippled as a crab, sugary as sassafras. I'm Black Billy Waters and you can kiss my sweet ass. My only house weighs on my back. There he struts like a Turkish crackerjack. London cues for any miracle, and that's a fact. All men are beggars, white or Black. And to this bright brown upstart hack among kings, one piece of advice, don't unpack, all the home you'll own is on your back. I'll dance for the price of a mean cognac, sing gay songs like a natural-born maniac. All men are beggars, white or Black. So let's scrape the cat gut clean, stack the cords three deep. See, I'm no quack, though my only house is on my back. All men are beggars, white or black."

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Villanelle meets Black Billy Waters. The father seduces one lady to many. And the prince sends him away. What does that mean? We don't know except that he disappears from history at that moment. He pays a substantial amount, but still, he pays for the boy. He says, "I'll keep the boy, you just have to leave." And so the father leaves, and now you have a young boy with the cushiest job for a musician probably in the world, except that he is in a place where he's all alone, doesn't know the language, no one looks like him. And the first thing that the prince says is, "Let's get you out of those clothes." The Undressing.

"First the sash, peacock blue. Silk unfurling round and round until I'm the India-ink dotting a cold British eye. Now I can bend to peel off my shoes, try to hook the tassel tips into the emerald sails of my satin pantaloons. Farewell sir monkey jacket, monkey red. A dew shirt tart and bright as the lemons the prince once let me touch. Goodbye lakeside meadow, goodbye hummingbird throat. No more games. I am to become a proper British gentleman, cuffed and buckled with breaches and a fine cravat. But how? My tossed bed glows while I am a smudge, a quenched wick, a twig shrouded in snow." Heap grows up, of course, he does become that proper British gentleman. From all accounts, he was quite a good-looking guy. There's one unfinished drawing of him and he was pretty fine. So I'm going to skip a few years and he's in his early 20s, right before he goes off to Vienna. But he's still in London. Pretty Boy.

"I can't say he walked the walk, talked it, but everybody did that, everybody had a story to front, the essential mess of their life. He was pretty though, nobody messed with the sight of him because it messed with them first, that invisible mirror shining the truth straight back. Oh, he had it easy out there in the world. Promenading his bright skin and curls, his agreeably nobbed nose, eyes black and brown lips plush enough to sink a lady's dreams into all night. Nobody told him the truth. Nobody had a truth worth telling. So they talked all the time, no secret's safe, a week, a day through Sunday tea. No one could tell him anything he really needed. The idea of something precious, soothing. He walked the length of St. James and kept his hanky in his sleeve. He walked himself and wielded himself to smell the rot, pouted wigs and mud and dying children. He looked and looked until he met one keen eye, seeing everything too. Old Black Billy Waters, peg leg and fiddle just to go and laughing as if to say what you going to do with that stare? And tossing it back quick as a coin flipped into a cup."

He was by all accounts, also an incredible musician and he became the first violinist in the prince's orchestra. Small accounts, he did use his looks and he used his exoticism a little bit to get ahead socially, I guess you could say. I'll say that as a euphemism. But he wanted something more. And what he really wanted to do was to play music that challenged him. He had heard about this madman, Beethoven, who's writing things that others were complaining were too difficult or odd, and he wanted to meet him. So he got a leave of absence and set off for Europe, set off for Vienna where Beethoven was and hoping to meet him. Because that's what you did, you just hung around and hoped that someone heard you and wanted to compose something for you so that you could hang your flag with theirs.

And so he heads off for Vienna. He's in his early 20s at this time. What he didn't know was that Beethoven was at that time just outside of Vienna, about to come back, trying to decide if he was going to come back to Vienna because he was going deaf. And his deafness came in, didn't happen quickly, it came in little spurts and gushes. So that he was trying to decide whether he could fake it any longer. His doctor had sent him to a little village right outside of Vienna, said the fresh air would cure his deafness. This is Beethoven's Return to Vienna.

"Three miles from my adopted city, Liza Village, where I came to peace. The world there was a calm place. Even the great Danube, no more than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness I had been ordered to recover. The hills were gold with late summer. My rooms were two plus a small kitchen situated upstairs in the back of a cottage at the end of Herrengasse. From my window I could see onto the courtyard where a linden tree twined skyward, leafy umbilicus, canted toward light, warped in the very act of yearning. And I would feed on the sun as if that alone would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged then music raged in me, rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough to ease the roiling. I would stop to light a lamp and whatever I'd missed, larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherds home toward evening song rushed in and I would rage again. I am by nature a conflagration. I would rather leap than sit and be looked at. So when my proud city spread her gypsy skirts, I reentered burning toward her greater constant light. Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly. I tell you, every tenderness I've ever known has been nothing but thwarted violence, an ache so permanent and deep, the lightest touch awakens it. It is impossible to care enough, I have returned with a second symphony and 15 piano variations, which I've named Prometheus, after the rogue titan, the half of God who knew the worst sin was to take what cannot be given back. I smile and bow and the world is loud. And though I dare not lean in to shout, can't you see that I'm deaf? I also cannot stop listening."

They do of course meet Beethoven, hears him play. And he stops work on the Eroica. He puts the symphony aside and decides to write this sonata for Bridgetower. And the sonata was really, really avant-garde for the time. You have to imagine everyone at that time thought of a sonata as something that the piano played. Then the violin came on top of the piano and did all the hard work and the piano just provided all that fabric underneath it. This one begins with a solo violin and then the piano answers and it's a call and response, it's clearly a call and response. And the public was amazed, they had never heard anything like that. This was what Beethoven was doing all the time.

And he didn't finish it until the night before. Really, really early in the morning, like about 3:00 in the morning, he finishes it. He didn't even have time to finish one particular section, which was going to be kind of an [foreign language 00:33:40]. So he told Bridgetower to just fake it at that point. And he did. The concert took place at 7:00 in the morning. I know, I would not have been there. I am so nocturnal, it's a shame. But I think that's to take advantage of the light, it was an outdoor concert. And the people who were there were all sorts of people. People go to concerts for all sorts of reasons, some to be seen, some to hear, and some who knows why. But this poem, you'll get several different spectators and they have a little title for each one so you'll know who they are. Augarden, 7:00 AM. Spectator one.

"Heavenly to escape the city's poisons and breathe honey, honey, honey. All praise morning's cathedral, the ranks of noble linden presiding. May we be privileged to pass through their green light and feathered fragrance with tip taps and mute nods. Amen." The British Ambassador, "There goes Schuppanzigh, huffing up the aisle in his entrepreneurial trappings. Dear God, the man expands weekly. Ah, the Archduke and Prince Lobkowitz, poor soul, such an unsightly specimen and feels just as miserable as he looks. I'd have ended it years ago, gone out like a man." Spectator two. "Curious beginning, solo violin, reminiscent of Bach, but wilder, a supplication. And the piano's reply is almost a lovers. A bird on a cliff returning its true mates call." Child, "He moves around too much. He's like a poplar in the wind."

Spectator three. "For a savage, he plays quite nicely. As for his figure, tall, slim, dare I say elegant. I'd heard he was a charmer, but never thought chimney soot applied to countenance could be considered handsome." Spectator two. "What a furious storm he rides and Beethoven listing side to side in accord with the gale bobbing that Rumpelstiltskin head as if to say, well done, my boy. That's it. A father to his prodigal son, come home at last." British ambassador. "To call this a sonata is obscene. A presto is presto and adagio, well, slow is meant to stay slow. This Beethoven is as loopy as they say. Imagine insulting the prince when he simply requested a song. Smashing figurines, dashing off in the middle of dinner." Spectator one. "I thought that infernal back and forth would never cease. A concert's meant for reverie, to drift away on nature's curative susurrations. A theme in variations, that's more like it." Child. "I like his waistcoat. How can he see out from all that darkness?"

After that incredible premiere, and it must've been amazing because Beethoven really did leap up and hug him. And then they sat down and did it again right at the part where he was supposed to improvise. They did pal around some, they did actually go out and get beers and things like that. And then something happened. And this is the part where you just don't know anymore of what really happened. Years later, at the end of his life, Bridgetower, who did live to be 80, merely said when asked. He said, "Well, I made a saucy remark about a girl." And that's all we know about why or how this friendship ended. But it ended suddenly and explosively, which is the way that Beethoven did things I think. Beethoven tore up the dedication and his dedication was in Italian, but it kind of said loosely to my grand pal and mulatto musician extraordinaire, basically.

And so he tore up the dedication and he actually rededicated it to Kreutzer, who was a French violinist who never played it. He just looked at the score and said, "This is impossible. No one can play this." No one told him it'd already been done, I guess. And at that point, Bridgetower really does drop out of the main pages of history. But he continued to live a long life, he continued to play music. He just wasn't up there in history's headlights, so to speak. And he goes back to London, he gets a degree so that he can teach music. We all know that story, that's why we're all here. To get his final music degree, he had to do a composition. And then it was played in great St. Mary's Church in Cambridge. No one's heard it, it's lost as well. But in this poem, we have the Chastened Bridgetower in Cambridge listening to his own piece. Cambridge, Great St. Mary's Church.

"I kneel, but not in sufferance, not in faith. There is a fulcrum beyond which the bow trip wobbles. No ardency nor forceful wrist can make it sing. I am there, at wit's balancing point. Music pours through the blackened nave, hollowing my bones to fit the space it needs. It needs so much of me, the soul's wicked cartridge emptying as fast as it fills. I kneel because even the reed bends before God's laughter splits it, and the storm moves on." I'm making a grand leap through the pages, if you want to read about the encounter with the girl, you'll have to get the book. But I'm going to skip to the end of his life. We know that he... And we only know this from death certificates, that he died alone and poor and subsidized housing on the south side of London, which was not posh as it is these days. And the person who witnessed his death was a neighbor. She was illiterate. And so she just witnessed it with an ex. But this is her statement. The Witness.

"Yeah, that's him, Bridgetower, didn't know his given name. George, ey, like the king. Fancy, fancy for that sour pint of breath he was wheezing. Half blood and although, I didn't mind him. Dusty a bit. I couldn't help brushing my sleeve after greeting, afraid he'd sprinkle some of that brown my way. Sorry, it ain't right to make fun of the fresh dead. Newly, now, I mean to say late departed, you know, them that's just cooling. So he was a fiddler, something of a stunner in his day. Day done, gone the sun. Ain't that a German song? Kind of mournful, wonder could he play that?"

It's a very, very male book, as you can tell. And there were times when I would kind of storm out of my room and say to my husband, "Oh, you guys are pricks." And then I would walk back in, keep going. It was hard to be relentless. The fact is that the women didn't matter in the story. And it was a hard pill to swallow and just keep going. And what made it even more difficult was the fact that one of the chief pieces of research, one of the greatest resources for me was written by a woman. She was Charlotte Papendiek, who was the queen's wardrobe keeper. And she of course was in the background, took care of the clothes, but she saw everything that went along.

And when she was old and getting near the end of her life, her children and her grandchildren tried to amuse her. So they said, "Why don't you write down everything that happened when you were at court, Mom?" And so she did, and she wrote these journals which were incredibly laden with costumes. I mean, everything was filtered through clothing, which was kind of interesting. But she had several encounters with Bridgetower and with his father. And so you get the backstory because there she was listening.

So at the end when I finished most of the book, I couldn't let it go. And I wrote a series of little kind of epilogues, and this is hers, I wanted her to have more of a voice. So this is for Charlotte. The Queen's Wardrobe Keeper, Mrs. Papendiek's Diary. "Dimity, elderberry, shawl, and muff. Husband, children, grandchildren, undinting service, no questions asked. Remember the time the coach let you out at the wrong station and you fell crossing the meadow, how the mud stain on your pew silk riled you less than the put out glare in the eyes of your host? Ah, Charlotte, did any stranger other than the queen you served ever call you by name? Would you have so desired it? Some say your diaries recollected 40 years after the fact that the urging of your children who thought at a proper amusement for passing time during an illness provide anecdotal insights into life at the Hanoverian court. Anecdotal, as in having no bearing on world events. Inconsequential theater, minutiae, silly stuff, all in a day's work, but your day, your life."

And at the end of all of this, my husband and my daughter accompanied me to England or I dragged them, I think, and I thank them very much, they're here today. So this is so wonderful. They went with me. Actually, we'd been before, but I wanted to just walk the London that Bridgetower had walked. So they were holding maps, I was holding maps and we kind of walked it, but I also wanted to find the place where he had finally died. And I knew that it wouldn't be at all what it was then, but I wanted to find it, and we did. So here we have The End, with MapQuest.

"Will I cry for you Polgreen. Will I drag out your end though it is long past, though I drove slowly past the place of your dying days and recorded what I knew I'd find there. Families and townhouses, a sensible Vox Hall parked to skew in the carport behind the green grate. Well, I tell you, whispering to no one in particular, how even the street signs seemed greasy and that it was raining natch. And whenever I tried to focus on the thought of you laid out in one of those miserable victory cottages, no turrets, no gilded palms, no jiggling regions. I had to do something, crack a joke or snap another useless photo of the Bollington Primary School. But when we turned left to round the block for the fifth time, it was the perfectly dismal site of a fast-food joint on the corner, Sam's Kebabs, which cheered me.

Would you understand the red and yellow neon script shouting like a Janissary band, so tacky it was buoyant, colorful because there was no good reason to be afraid of shouting with the whole world determined not to hear you, though they tried to shut you up all the time. Do I care enough, George Augustus Bridgetower, to miss you? I don't even know if I really like you. I don't know if your playing was truly gorgeous or if it was just you, the sheer miracle of all that darkness swaying close enough to touch palm tree and Samba and glistening tiger running circles into golden oil. Ah, Master B, little great man, tell me how does a shadow shine?"

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to end and then we're going to do a little talking. I thought I'd bring you out of the 19th century into the 21st, with two uncollected poems, two short poems. The first one is a prose poem called Prose in a Small Space, with apologies to every prose writer out there. Prose in a Small Space. "It's supposed to be prose if it runs on and on, isn't it? All those words, too many to fall into rank and file stumbling bare-ass drunk onto the field, reporting for duty. Yes, sir. Spilling out as shamelessly as the glut from a mega-billion dollar chemical facility. Just the amount of glittering effluvium it takes to transport a little girl across a room, beige carpet, thick under her oxfords, curtains blowzy with spring. Is that the scent of daffodils drifting in? Daffodils don't smell, but prose doesn't care. Prose likes to hear itself talk, prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canopies, lust rampant in the antipasta.

For example, a silver fork fingered sadly as a heroine crumples a linen napkin in her lap to keep from crying out at the site of Lord Campion's regal brow, incline tenderly toward the wealthy young widow. Prose applauds such syntactical dalliances. Then is it poetry if it's confined? Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention, over here it's me, while the white spaces air field, early morning silence before the school bell shape themselves around that one bright seizure. And if that's so, what do we have here? A dream or three paragraphs? We have white space too, is this music? As for the words left out banging at the gates, we could let them in. But where would we go with our orders? Our stuttering pride."

And a little teeny one for spring, because spring has happened here. It's called Little Outburst. "Tired of singing for someone else. Tired of rubbing my thighs to catch your ear. When the sky falls tonight, I'll stand on my one green leaf and it will be my time, my noise, my ecstasy." Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Here's the Jay Leno part, this is fun. Kyle Dargan has graciously agreed to quiz me, so-

Kyle Dargan:

Gracious? More like my honor. But thank you for the lovely reading.

Rita Dove:

Thank you.

Kyle Dargan:

I have these sheets... Chairs a little too cushy.

Rita Dove:

They are cushy, man, I would never get out of these things. Okay.

Kyle Dargan:

I have a few questions about the book, but since we are at AWP, I have a few questions about our literary world that I think might be worthwhile to ask in this venue.

Rita Dove:

Oh. Okay, we will.

Kyle Dargan:

But to start, I've already heard the story about how you originally became interested in Bridgetower, but I think it might be worthwhile to let the audience hear that as well?

Rita Dove:

Okay.

Kyle Dargan:

Then we can transition from that to talking about the breadth of the book.

Rita Dove:

Okay. Well, I'm a classically trained cellist, and then I played the viola da gamba, so I knew classical music. And yet this story was one that I had only heard peripherally and just really hadn't paid attention to, oddly enough. One night my husband and I, Fred and I were watching a movie called Immortal Beloved, which is a biopic about Beethoven. And there was one scene in the movie where Beethoven is walking through a room of musicians to go off and be alone and be tortured. One of those shots. But as he walks through the room, all these musicians are eagerly standing there. And one of them is a Black guy with a violin. And Fred and I kind of went like this, we looked at each other like, where did he come from? And I thought that blind casting, I don't know, so I just Googled it. I simply put Black Beethoven, I said Beethoven Black violinist. And up came only one hit at that time, now there's tons of them, thank God.

But one hit on this George Bridgetower, and I was amazed and so that I didn't think to write a book of poems about it at all. I in fact was planning an entirely different project. But curiosity just kept me going. At first, I just kind of looked stuff up just to see how far I could get. And I thought, I know the music world and I know German, I can find a little bit more about him. So I started with Beethoven because I figured there's a lot on him and I can find... So I began to find little things about him here and there. Until I stumbled upon Papendiek diaries, which gave me all of his childhood. But I became haunted by this guy who was clearly a phenomenal artist and who clearly had disappeared utterly. And so when something haunts you, you don't really have a choice I don't think, you just have to do it. So I finally said, "I got to go in there." I didn't think it was going to become as big a book as it did.

Kyle Dargan:

Oh. I think haunting is an interesting word because when you talk to writers who engaged in the act of writing these kinds of books based on history, the entire manuscript on one figure or theme. There's always that period of forgetting, in the sense that you do all that research, but then in order to actually write the poems, something has to be forgotten so that you can enter the story and provide what you will. So I'm curious to know, one, how did you decide on where to stop? Because as I went through the book, I thought to myself, this could have just been a sequence or a series just about Bridgetower, which really recreate the world around him. So at what point did you decide that that world needed to stop? And at that point, what didn't make it into the book?

Rita Dove:

What didn't make it? Well, at first I thought too, I could write a few poems about this man, but I needed to understand how he could even exist in that world and move through it as freely as he seemed to do. So to understand that I had to understand the world he moved through. So that meant also, I thought, no one else will understand the fascination of this unless I create the whole world. That's why people started coming in. The biggest problem, the biggest stumbling block was Beethoven, because he's Beethoven and you don't imitate Beethoven, you don't want to take on Beethoven. So once I could get past that and once I said, "Of course, why not? Why shouldn't I talk like Beethoven or assume to be him?" Then everything else became a little easier. But it is about Bridgetower, but it was also about all these other people.

And I suddenly realized that the life of a musician at that time had so many of the same kinds of strains that we're going through, what initially made me haunted by Bridgetower, Haydn's in there, because he had been his earliest teacher and stuff. But Haydn, he often complained he felt enslaved by all of his patrons. And also treated kind of dismissively once the talent was done, you were done. So the musician's life, the life of being an exotic, the life of being exotic musician, all of these things became very mixed up in the world. And I saw that the world that he went through was a markedly different world than ours. The being quote unquote mulatto, even the word mulatto was used totally differently then. So I had to include that whole world, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

Now there were things that were left out. I mean, I did forget the research. I did a lot of research and then I would put it aside and forget it and write. And only later when I'd go back and check the dates to make sure they were right, but not while the writing was going on. But Napoleon had to be cut, it was kind of fun to cut him. But he was always on the edges, he's in there a little bit, but he's always on the edges because all these wars were happening. I mean, it was always... But it was too much, that was too much. I thought, no, you got to pair it off somewhere. So he didn't make the cut, though he had a couple poems, but gone. And I did have to, I liked the prince a lot, Prinny, he was such a poet. I mean, he was really such an totally impractical and yet in love with everything that made the spirit soar, but he was a totally impractical man. And he does have a few poems, but I cut a lot of him too, because in their end, it wasn't his story, he was just part of the world.

Kyle Dargan:

Okay. You say that Bridgetower's world is so much different than our own, but I wanted to think about a character from one of your other collections, Beulah.

Rita Dove:

Beulah.

Kyle Dargan:

In the sense that Bridgetower and Beulah are both characters who represent a certain beauty and refinement, but are in some ways socially or culturally alienated from the lives that they could have led?

Rita Dove:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Kyle Dargan:

And I'm wondering, was there any awareness of that going into this book? Or is there something about Beulah and something about Bridgetower that comes out of you, that manifests?

Rita Dove:

That's probably it. I did not think about Beulah at all when I was writing this, but that doesn't mean a thing. I think that Michael Shaban last night, he was fabulous. And he said at one point that when anybody writes something, you write something that it tells a lot about the person who is writing it. If you're writing a dramatic monologue, it tells an awful lot about the person who was actually, it's more of an autobiography than autobiographies are since we all lie, as he said. And I do think that the reason why Bridgetower haunted me was because I found so many touchstones in myself as a person who, yes, likes beauty and refinement and who wants to be the absolute best in whatever I do, whatever I write, I want it to be the absolute best and not want to compromise that in any kind of way.

And knows that as soon as you appear in front of the world, they have all sorts of names or handles for you that you can embrace or not. I mean, what you want to do is be embraced as a whole person, we all do. And we all are looked at as either male, female, Black, white, also hyphenations. But this is brought, I guess, to a boil, I think with Bridgetower because he was billed as an exotic person, he just seemed such a good fit. And I felt when I was writing those poems, I felt like it was me. Or the line between him and me, there was no difference. And then when I wrote with Haydn, it was like there was no line either. So that part of us that yearns for absolute understanding and beauty and exalt... I mean being exaltation, I guess. That part of everyone, that's keeps us writing poems, that's what keeps us listening to them or listening to music. And that was the part of him that led me in, I don't know. But that's in Beulah too, because she did not live the life she yearned for.

Kyle Dargan:

And in some way their deaths are similar.

Rita Dove:

Yeah, that's true.

Kyle Dargan:

The idea of labels and tags, it's a good point to transition into the rest of my questions. I remember when American Smooth came out, and this was a moment, I taught a class last semester called Complicating Blackness, African-American Literature. And as I was preparing for the course, I kept going back to this moment I had around the time that American Smooth was published. And I was with another established African American poet who said something to the effect of, "Nobody wants to read any poems about ballroom dancing." And I thought about that because I wondered if he wasn't African American and you weren't African American, would that same expectation exists in terms of what one you should write about into what others would want to read-

Rita Dove:

From me.

Kyle Dargan:

Of yours.

Rita Dove:

Yeah, right, right.

Kyle Dargan:

So as someone who has written, wrote through the Black Arts Movement and is still writing now in an age where we have this talk of a post-racial society. What do you think is at stake when we use race today, still to color and define our expectations of writers and also of audiences?

Rita Dove:

Woo, talk about complicating. No, well, I'm going to take this bit by bit because this is a great question, it's really a great question. First of all, because I can't resist, I don't know who the person was, but I also could say that it was obviously he didn't read the book. Because the book is called American Smooth, and that's a brand of ballroom dancing, but I think there may be like six poems in there about ballroom dancing. But that does tell you something, it tells you something about the way we... Because our society moves so quickly, where we quickly encapsulate things and you want to put it in cubbyholes, and they think, oh, book of about ballroom dancing. Oh, Black poet who writes a book about ballroom dancing, what the hell is she doing writing a book about ballroom dancing? So it happens. And it's his loss, it's anyone's loss who tries to move by those kind of markers.

I think that post-racial society. Yeah right, that's our dream, this is our dream to have a post-racial society, and we're moving toward and saying, it's so amazing, here we have Obama who is a mixed, raised biracial present, and you've got Bridgetower trying to negotiate his world. And he's the same kind of mix. There is absolutely nothing wrong, in fact, there's everything right about looking at someone, meeting someone and noticing that they are African American, Asian American, I don't care, woman or man, it would be totally facetious to assume that we are colorblind, racially blind, gender blind.

Of course we see it, the thing is that we have to not be afraid of it, this is the point. Once we're not afraid of the differences, then it becomes such an incredible richness that's in front of us, that's just simply it. So you read something and it takes place in 19th century Vienna, and you don't know much about it. I dare say that if something like this book might've been written by a white person, everyone would've just dutifully gotten out their lexicons and looked it up. But when it's written by a Black person, I say, "Well, I don't really want to have to look all this stuff up." I don't know, I feel that we just have to be open to whatever's out there. Why not? Now the last part of your question, would you say it again? That great last complicated part?

Kyle Dargan:

I mean, you addressed some of it already, but it's just a question of what's at stake when we still craft our expectations of what writers write and what audiences desire based on race? I think it's interesting just thinking about the book, because there are poems in the book that I feel could have only been written by someone who had some African American experience and someone who was a woman. I could think a poem like Black Pearl to me as a poem. So there is still some necessary import in terms of context and understanding where someone's coming from. But on the other side, when we say, well, this is something that only someone of this race or only an audience of this.

Rita Dove:

Yeah. I mean, yes, there are... I'm not saying, yeah. Obviously, yeah, there are some poems in there that could only even written by someone who's Black or someone only poems that can only be written by someone who knew something about music or knew what Vienna looked like or something like that. Fine and good. But that doesn't mean that, there's everything right about writing out of an experience that only you can write about.

Audience:

Amen. Amen.

Rita Dove:

So if someone writes a poem or this poem, which is obviously in completely and thoroughly soaked an African American experience, and only that person could have written it that way. That's great. Now who do you want to understand it? Is the next question. And how much is the audience? How much are you as an audience willing to step up to understand it? Is a corollary to that question. And that's where things start to falter. Someone writes a poem, I call it the burden of explanation, actually, I've said this to some of my students. I say that the problem is that the burden of explanation usually falls on anyone who's not of the mainstream. There are things that you learned in school and that a person writes who's in the mainstream just doesn't have to worry about it.

But if you come from, let's take my example. If I were going to write a poem about hair care, something about hair, there's so much that I might feel burdened to explain to an audience which my audience would not understand, grease, hair grease or extensions, all sorts of stuff. Whereas I know everything about blow-drying hair, though I don't do it. See? So now how far will the audience come to meet you? I say that, yes, it is a burden, but it's a burden that will make you a better writer because what you've got to do is make the poem or the story so interesting, every word so vital, that even if you don't swerve, just start to explain it, they'll want to find out.

Or you describe that hair so good, so well, that those who know it will be nodding, yeah, yeah. And the others are going, "Wow, wow, wow." Fine. This is what anybody does if you do a historical novel, this is what anybody does if you're writing anything that outside of 21st century America. But it becomes complicated with race and with gender because there's so much guilt and rage built in to the gaps and the lapses and frustration. So I think that it is important, and it is essential that you write out of your own differences. But to also be aware without ranker, that if you want the larger audience, then you're just going to have to be that much better at making this irresistible to them.

Kyle Dargan:

Yeah. And I think coming back to this book was so interesting, is that when I read it as a poet, I think I really get a sense of that this book is about language and your love of it, your love of its music. When I read each poem, it's really that, yes, there's this story. But as a writer, one of the things that I'm interested in is this relationship that you as a writer have with the words on the page and you can feel it, it's almost tactile. Which is not to go back too much because I still have other briar patches to walk you through.

Rita Dove:

Briar patches, I love it. Okay, I'm going to settle in.

Kyle Dargan:

Formally, the line is so different throughout the book as if you had an attention to each poem's music, and that music dictated the line in each poem.

Rita Dove:

That's true, thank you. Yeah, I really did intend that.

Kyle Dargan:

So-

Rita Dove:

Well, the first poem in the book, which I read to you, that gets the story out of the way. I mean, it's not a novel in verse, and this is not prose broken, it's aligned, it is a book of poems. So I wanted to get the whole story of Bridgetower just out of the way, you write the first poem, now we can get down to business and enjoy the interstices.

Kyle Dargan:

So I think this is more of the softball of the last two questions, so we'll start here. As someone who has earned an MFA and someone who teaches in an MFA program, has done so for a while. What do you think is, I guess, most relevant and unique about the experience of earning an MFA? And how do you think, had you not gone that route, had you not studied writing that way, how might you be different as a writer?

Rita Dove:

I have no idea what I would be like without the MFA. The first thing I think we need to acknowledge with MFA programs and things is that, this is a gift you get before a student. I mean, to get two years or a year or three, I don't know, to get that time where someone says, "Yes, you are a writer. You're here to learn, but this is your job, this is your enterprise for this next two years." That's pretty remarkable that we could get that kind of validation in this society particularly. That's the first thing. The second thing I think that MFAs do that process if it's attended to properly, it is an apprenticeship, you really are in there to learn as much as possible about how many ways your voice stretches and how much you don't know.

And I took it, it's not a time to just polish things up and make them smooth, but actually make it ragged to just go, go, go, as far as... Because it's the last free time you got before you end up teaching yourself. That's one thing, I think that for me personally, the MFA, I went to Iowa, I heard Joy Harjo say something about Iowa yesterday. And we want to get T-shirts that say survivors of Iowa, I think that would be basically... I was brought up, first of all, as my father used to say to me, he said, "You will encounter prejudice in your life." He said. He said, "You're going to just have to be 150% better than everyone else, and you still may not get the job, but you'll know you're 150% better." Gosh.

And we didn't take that as... I don't know, I kind of grew up with that. So it's sort of like you just... In other words, you have your own standard and when you're screwing up and when you're not living up to it. But when you know that you're up to your standard, then people can do all sorts of stuff to you and just say, "Okay, I know." And that did help me through Iowa, I must say, because it was a lot of political poetry, political stuff going on. As people tried to get insurance, other students that they were emerge on top and be the great person at the end. I mean, how crazy is that? What does that matter if you don't like what you're writing?

So the first thing that I learned from creative writing program, a negative thing, which turned into a positive thing, is that I needed to be satisfied with my own writing no matter what anyone else said about it. And that I had to be my toughest critic, and that if anybody said this was really great, then not just this basket, but look and say, "Is it really?" So I did learn that. I do think that the exposure to writers, exposure to different styles, exposure to criticism that ripped you to shreds, but you realize it's not me that's ripped to shreds, it's only criticism ripping up something that they can't rip up. That was good, I learned a hell of a lot. And nothing has ever been worse in my life.

Sorry, Iowa, but it was a rough time. No, you know what it is? I mean, look, this world and this country is not made for writers or artists of any kind, this is not a country that values necessarily its artists, not like some countries. It's a country of pioneers, other things are valued. So we scramble for a very small piece of a pie that's pretty non-existent, and that makes for violent behavior sometimes and anxiety, coupled with the fact that you're pouring out your soul on the page. And at the same time you need to eat. So that can lead to some pretty weird behavior on all sides, and I think everybody has horror stories to tell, I do know that I have, some of my best friends are still friends that I forged in Iowa. And I met my husband there, so I can't complain too much, but he wasn't in the program.

Kyle Dargan:

My last question I guess it speaks to life after the MFA. As someone who's won a number of awards, received numerous recognition, how do you feel about the current prize systems effect on the literary world and in poetry specifically? Are the prizes that we have right now, are they awarding and encouraging artistic excellence or do you feel like the system is asking for a replication of certain aesthetics and certain themes and certain books that please certain judges? And I noticed that you're a very busy person, but rarely do I see your name as a judge for something, and that seems like one of the things that you protect in terms of your time. So I'm curious why is that?

Rita Dove:

Well, there's no denying the fact that getting a prize will certainly help you as a writer in terms of jobs and publications and things like that. And that we all hope, and I think that most prizes are, they say they're looking for remarkable work. So it isn't that we consider in some of our Nobel Prizes and say, oh yeah, none of them are any good. That being said, prizes also part of a business system too. And so everyone's going to complain at one point or another about whether these prizes forward the work. What I worry about is what I see, a kind of a tendency for younger poets to write toward a prize, write a book that they think is prize worthy, trying to write it so that it appeals to a certain judge that they know is going to judge it or not. And not writing the poems that they need to write.

Now it's easy for me to say, yeah, I'm sitting up here, I don't have to do that, I know that when I was a young writer, there are a few literary prizes around, but there weren't as many as there are now. The reason why there are so many is because it sells, I mean, commercially the so-and-so prize or the so-and-so prize, instead of saying I'm getting my book published with this and this press. I don't think we can get around it anymore. The reason why I don't judge as many prizes, I used to judge, I have judged a few and gone through the politics of judging larger things like National Book Awards or things like that. But I realized that it was just...

I'll tell you one experience that I had, I had an experience with a prize. I always ask when I judge a prize that I see all the manuscripts. Usually in bigger prizes, there's someone there or several people who screen and then give you the top 25 or something like that. And I wanted to see all the manuscripts and I said, "How about you do this? Give me the top 25. If I asked to see the top 50, I would like to see them. Tell anybody yet, and I'll look." And I discovered in this one prize that I was doing, I asked to see all of them because the top 25 were so uniform in style, they just all sounded like same. I asked to see the top 50 and there were a few that were interesting.

And then I said, "Well just send them all to me." And they said, "Well, we're sorry, we sent them back." I said, "What do you mean you sent them back?" And they said, "Well, people were waiting." And I felt I couldn't control it, I couldn't control what I wanted to do. And so unless I can really make sure that I can do that, I don't do it, and it's hard to do. I know because there's a lot of people and thousands of manuscripts and people are waiting. And so I just don't do it as much, and I also try to protect my time as well.

When I got the Pulitzer Prize, it did change my life. I didn't expect it though. I wasn't writing for it, I didn't think that I was going to get... It hadn't occurred to me in my wildest dreams that I could get a prize for that. I'm grateful, it was really sweet and it did change my life. I wish that it were like that for everybody. I see so much, the back stabbing and backstage maneuvering going on. On both sides, I mean, from the poets trying to appeal to a certain person. And I think it isn't that way for everyone. But-

Kyle Dargan:

Hopefully.

Rita Dove:

Yeah. I don't know. Does that answer all your question or did I leave some part of it out?

Kyle Dargan:

I'll let you off the hook.

Rita Dove:

Whoa.

Kyle Dargan:

No-

Rita Dove:

Thank you.

Kyle Dargan:

Thank you for your honest answers. Thank you for enduring me-

Rita Dove:

Oh, you were great.

Kyle Dargan:

And thank you for you're very generous reading.

Rita Dove:

Thank you, Kyle. Thank you. Thanks. Now go home.

Moderator:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP Podcast Series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website at www.awpwriter.org.