Poem Text The green lamp flares on the table. Dove lives with her husband and daughter in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Professor of English at the University of Virginia Commonwealth. Mellon Foundation, Dove holds the distinction of having been the first African American, as well as the youngest individual, to hold the post of United States Poet Laureate, a position she held from 1993 to 1995. In addition to her other achievements, which include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Andrew W. There she met her husband, the German-born writer and journalist Fred Viebahn. This led to further studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The following year, Dove studied at West Germany’s Tubingen University as a Fulbright scholar. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Miami University of Ohio in 1973-where she had enrolled as a National Achievement Scholar-and graduated summa cum laude. An excellent student, Dove was invited to the White House in 1970 as a Presidential Scholar, ranking nationally among the best high school students of the graduating class of that year. Dove, the first African-American chemist to break the racial barrier in the tire and rubber industry, and the former Elvira Elizabeth Hord. Author Biographyīorn in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, to well-educated parents, Dove is the daughter of Ray A. More abundant than this desert, which only produces nuts and figs with tough skins. The rest of the passage may be a reference to her father or to the cultural concept of a male god, who is “asleep, upstairs.” Either way, the meaning is the same-the reality of this life can never measure up to her fantasy of a world of possibilities In the first stanza, the speaker addresses an unidentified second person when she says, “You tell me the same thing / as that one, / asleep, upstairs.” Later, the speaker reveals that this “you” is her lover or husband. This poem may also be portraying the difficulty of being a woman, with certain emotional and romantic needs, as symbolized by the image of the moon, in a society dominated by men. ![]() The speaker sees that “the possibilities” in this life may be impossible, “like golden dresses in a nutshell.” As a child, the speaker relates, she “fell in love / with a Japanese woodcut / of a girl gazing at the moon.” Further, the speaker confesses, “I waited with her for her lover.” Her identification with the imaginary girl is so complete that even now, in this life, the speaker associates the imaginary lover with her present lover: “he had / your face, though I didn’t know it.” Finally, the speaker concludes that her life and her lover’s “will be the same,” and that she will remain “a stranger in this desert,” this life, though she will continue to try to attain the impossible, “nursing the tough skin of figs.” “This Life,” like several other poems in the same collection, grapples with the problem of fantasy versus reality. ![]() Public Broadcasting has devoted an hour-long primetime special to her life and work.This poem was published in Dove’s first complete book of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner, in 1980. Dove has brought her poetry to television audiences through her appearances on CNN and NBC’s Today Show. Over its more than 200 pages, it 'has the sweep and vivid characters of a novel', as Mark Doty wrote in O, The Oprah Magazine. ![]() ![]() She was also the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.ĭove's most k,own collection of poetry, Sonata Mulattica, was published in 2009. At the age of 40, Dove was the youngest person to hold the position and is the first African American to hold the position since the title was changed to Poet Laureate. In 1992, she was nominated a United States Poet Laureate by the Librarian of Congress, an office she held from 1993 to 1995. Norton in 2016 it carries an excerpt from President Barack Obama's 2011 National Medal of Arts commendation on its back cover. Her Collected Poems 1974–2004 was released by W.W. Her famous work to date is 'Thomas and Beulah', published in 1986, a collection of poems based on the lives of her maternal grandparents, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Dove's writings aren't confined to a specific era or school in contemporary literature her wide-ranging topics and the precise poetic language with which she captures complex emotions defy easy categorization. About Rita Dove Rita Dove is an american poet and writer.
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