>> Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Female Speaker: It's my great honor this morning to be able
to introduce Rita Dove to you.
She has had so many honors and awards conferred upon her.
I am just going to select a few to mention.
Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and consultant
to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995.
She also served at Poet Laureate of the Commonweath
of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.
Rita Dove was awarded in 1987, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
In 2001, she was awarded the Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award
and in 1996, the National Humanities Medal.
In 2008, Rita Dove received the Library
of Virginia's Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2009,
she received the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal.
In addition to her poetry, Rita Dove has published collections
of short stories and essays, a novel called "Through the Ivory Gate,"
a play called "The Darker Face of the Earth," which was produced here
at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. among other venues.
She has also written a song cycle for soprano and orchestra called
"Seven for Luck," which was premiered
by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998.
From 2000 to 2002, she wrote a weekly column for Book World called,
"The Poet's Choice," and I know I'm not the only one
who misses that column.   I really enjoyed that column.
Given all the distinctions
and honors Rita Dove has had conferred upon her, I am embarrassed
to tell you that the Library of Congress made a typo mistake
when it printed the title of her newest collection of poetry,
which is called, "Sonata Mulattica."
It's spelled in your programs with two L's, Mullatica.
That's wrong.   It should be Mulattica.
What can I tell you?
Even Homer nods once in a while, right?
So, typos happen.
It's a pleasure and an honor to be able to introduce Rita Dove.
Please welcome her with me.   [ applause ]
>> Rita Dove: Thank you.
Great to be here and yes, typos happen,
you just have to deal with them.
You know, I would really like to get to your questions as soon
as possible, because I always find that I might have a certain agenda
and then something else comes out of left field from you.
So, let me do it this way.
What I'd like to do is to talk a little bit
about how I became a writer and how that led to this latest book,
"Sonata Mulattica," and read to you a few poems from the book
so that you can get a sense of it.
I'll say right off I'm going to make a confession and tell you
that my first writing, the reading, actually, that I really fell in love
with was science fiction.
I still love science fiction, but my brother, who is two years older
than I, would get a subscription to Analog Fantasy Magazine
and whenever he finished a copy he would let me read it.
And so I began to -- what I loved about science fiction,
this was when I was nine, 10 years old,
was the fact that worlds were totally imagined and yet the people
who were in these worlds were like you and me,
that they were human beings moving to a world
that they did not understand and trying to figure it
out using everything that they had in their path,
all of their emotional baggage, to make, you know, quantum theory
and leafing and all that stuff work.
So, for a 10-year-old that made sense.
You know, as a child you're always being plunged into, if you remember,
you were plunged into situations where you are constantly trying
to figure out the language
and so science fiction felt very close to me.
There were also aliens in science fiction, and aliens did not look
like your white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
They had three eyes.
They had green skin and all that stuff and that appealed to me
as well, because they were different.
They were looked at differently by the "human beings,"
and very often they would prove to be smarter than the human beings.
You know, they had civilizations way beyond ours and that appealed to me
as well, because I always felt, as a 10-year-old,
I felt like I was different, not completely alien,
but I was made aware of the fact that I was different.
I was listening to Esmeralda Santiago talk this morning
at the Washington Post breakfast and she talked about the fact
that she had to invent the lives that were not in those books,
the ones, you know, that she never saw her own face
in the books that she read.   And I began to read other things,
but then I realized that I was not in them.
There was no black girl in the story and so I began
to write short stories first to put myself in them, and then poems.
Why poems?
I think it was poems because I was also, at the same time,
terribly in love with music.
I began playing the cello when I was 10 and the timber
of the way music moved appealed to me.
This was a language that I understood,
and poetry is the closest thing to music, I think, in language.
And I think that's why poetry has always been my first love,
though I've written other things.
So, that's a little bit about my background.
I come from a family of chemists.   It isn't necessarily in the genes.
My father's a chemist.   My brother is a computer scientist.
My sister was a chemist.
So, I'm also an alien within my family, because -- [laughter]
>> Rita Dove: You know, they're all into science.
One of the greatest moments of freedom for me was when I came
to my father, I was a junior in college,
and I decided I wanted to be a poet.
So, I told my mother I wanted to be a poet.
She says, "Tell your father yourself."
[laughter]
>> Rita Dove: I went into the room and I said, "Dad."
And he was reading the paper.   I said, "Dad.
I'm going to be a poet."
And he stopped for a second, swallowed, and then he said,
"I never understood poetry, so don't be upset if I don't read it."
And all I could think of was "yes, he's not going to read it."
[laughter]
>> Rita Dove: I continued to play cello all the way through college
and into my young adulthood or whatever you want to call it.
I needed music in my life.   I loved classical music.
I loved playing in small ensembles, string quartets or trios,
because it was the closest thing
to a symbiotic relationship I could think of.
You really had to listen to each other.
When I was in high school I had a group of friends
who we all decided we were going to, we were all classical musicians,
a whole group of black friends,
and we decided we were going to play jazz.
That didn't seem like much of a stretch and what was interesting,
it was like close ensemble work.
And so we had a group and we played jazz for a while.
I kept up with my music, even as I began to write poetry,
and one of my creative writing teachers in college said one day
as a warning, "Don't ever try
to describe music, to write about music.
It won't work."
So, of course, that's all I've ever done, I think, my entire life.
It's always been drawn back to trying to describe music.
All of this is background to this book,
which is called "Sonata Mulattica" as Maureen said.
It started with a very unusual and, I think you'd say,
kind of inconsequential moment.
I was watching a movie with my husband at home.
We had rented a movie.   It was called "A Mortal Beloved."
It's about Beethoven.
And there's one scene in the movie where Beethoven,
who is just going deaf and was trying to decide if he is going
to tell the rest of the world or try to fake it, he walks to a group
of musicians who are waiting to play for him.
They're very eager.   You see their faces.
And among these musicians is a young black man all dressed
up in 19th century finery.
And I'm thinking, no, what's wrong with this picture?
I mean, where'd he come from?   Thank goodness for Google.
I simply put in black violinist Beethoven and it came up.
At that time there was only about one entry.
He did exist.   This was a man.
His name was George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower.
He not only played violin during the time of Beethoven,
but Beethoven had stopped work on his third symphony in order
to compose a sonata for this young man.
He dedicated the sonata to him.
They hung out for a few weeks in Vienna, and then just as suddenly
as this all happened, Bridgetower disappears.
He disappears from history so to speak.
Beethoven destroys the dedication and re-dedicates it
to a violinist named Kreutzer who never played it.
He said it was impossible to play.   It was too hard.
Bridgetower had already premiered it with Beethoven at the piano.
And I thought, where did he go?
Where did he go this incredible prodigy
and why did he disappear from history?
That began this book.
It had everything that I loved in my life that, you know, besides poetry.
It had music, classical music.
It had, you know, German, which is something that I've always been --
you know, I've always studied German and I love German.
And it also had some very little thing, and that is that quality
of being a stranger among people who still accept you.
Because I wanted to find out what it was like for Bridgetower to move
through 19th century Europe, and that began my quest.
The biggest difficulty with the book, and I'm going to first start
with an early poem, the biggest difficulty was
to get past Beethoven.
Beethoven, the marble bust on the piano, the one that you labor under,
and so, interestingly enough, when I -- I began gathering information
and material, it was hard to find and it went off
in all different directions, but one of the first poems I wrote was
in Beethoven's voice, because I had to get him out of the way basically.
I had to kind of stand up to him.
It was the first poem that I wrote is in the middle of the book
and I'll get to it in a minute, but let me start earlier,
because when I began to imagine what it was like for this man,
this Bridgetower, what I found out about him was
that he started playing the violin when he was probably about five.
He went on the concert tour when he was nine.
His father billed himself as the African Prince,
so you know he was a character, but he took his son on the road
and there was this young boy in the middle of Europe playing in front
of royalty, and I thought to myself he must've been terrified,
even if he was a prodigy.   He must have been terrified.
And so here's a poem.   It takes place 1789.
He was nine years old.
His father has taken him to Paris to make money.
You have to imagine that if you are a musician at that time without,
you know, iPods and without mp3's, you have to play live.
You know, there's no recording.   And he's at a concert in Paris.
1789 in Paris is not a good time to be there, right?
But he was there.
"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 tales, click, clack, sputter, whirr, he could make a song
of it, dance this four-in-hand down the cobbles of the rue de Bac
as he balances his small weight against the pricking cushions.
Clack, sputter, whirr, 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 spring's careless fingers feathering his chest
and smell April's ferment in the stink
of the poor 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 massive 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 the lake's still frozen at sunset, aglow with reflective light.
Soon the music will take him across.
He'll feel each string's ecstasy strum 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, [unintelligible]
yet 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 of 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 gaze on the boy as if
to say you are what I am, what I yearn 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.
[applause]   >> Rita Dove: Thank you.
Thank you.
There's a little story behind that story.
Because the facts I had were that he had played in Paris in 1789,
that spring, and I thought to myself, what would it be
like for a little mixed-race boy, because his mother was Polish,
his father was African, to be standing in front of all
of these dignitaries who came to the thing, what would it be like?
And then I thought, wouldn't it have been wonderful
if Thomas Jefferson had been at one of those concerts,
because he was embarrassed at that time.
I fretted over the fact that I couldn't find this
out until my husband said, "Oh, just call it what doesn't happen
and you can do whatever you want."   [laughter]
>> Rita Dove: So I did and I wrote, started working on the poem,
and I was still doing research.
I live in Charlottesville, which is Monticello land,
and so I was up there a lot.
One of the researchers came to me one day and said, "I have this book
that might be interesting to you."
And it turned out it was a recording, a listing of all
of the concerts that Thomas Jefferson had gone to.
He was just an incredible note-taker and he had noted
down all the concerts he had gone to and who played and he had, indeed,
been at one of Bridgetower's concerts,
which gave me -- [applause]
>> Rita Dove: I don't think Sally Hemings was probably there,
but that's my little piece of information.
So there we have this boy.
My impulse was not -- I wanted to recover his life,
but the more I went into it I realized I wanted to bring him
to life, which means imagining a life, because we don't know.
You know, we don't know anything but the facts.
He went to London.   Here's another fact.
He went to London right after Paris,
because Paris was getting a little too hot at those times, you know,
so they skipped over the channel and went to London.
He gains the Prince of Wales' attention and so he begins
to play concerts at the theaters there.
And music was everywhere because people didn't have it plugged
into their ears, you heard it on the street.
There were street musicians as well.
In my research I stumbled across another incredible figure.
His name was Black Billy Waters and that's what he called himself.
He had a peg leg.   He played the fiddle.
And his pitch, where he played,
was right outside of the Adelphi Theater.
And when I looked at all of these old maps, I'm really a nerd.
I mean, I had old maps of London.   I am looking through them.
I realized that this little boy and his father, the African Prince,
would walk past Black Billy Waters on their way to the concert
and the father would dress his son up in kind of,
I wouldn't say African clothes, but let's say they were clothes
that the Londoners imagined Africans would wear.
[laughter]
>> Rita Dove: Which means pantaloons and all sorts of things.
So he was dressed like that and they would walk past Black Billy Waters.
This is Black Billy Waters' poem.
"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.
It 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.
[laughter] My only house is on my back.
There he struts like a Turkish crackerjack,
London cues for any novelty, 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 catgut clean.   Stack the chords three deep.
See, I'm no quack, though my only house is on my back.
All men are beggars, white or black.
[applause]   >> Rita Dove: Thank you.
I call that my [unintelligible] gone wild.
It's a little longer than [unintelligible],
but as I was working on that poem I thought, what kind of form,
what kind of form would be best for Black Billy Waters and I thought,
what he did every day was to play the same songs over and over.
He's on a loop, right, so those repeated lines was the right form
for him.   The father was a character.
There were many characters and what I discovered
about this whole period was that I had come
to it imagining bringing my 20th century sensibility at the time
to it where it was a totally different sensibility
and race relations were complicated, but very,
very different, extremely different.
They did not have the economical baggage that we have,
which made it slightly different.
The father was a great hit at court, too big of a hit, in fact,
and after he seduced a few too many ladies,
the Prince basically banished him, basically paid him off and said,
"I'll take the boy and raise him.   You must leave the country."
So, what happened is that this young boy who was dressed
up in these outlandish clothes is taken in by the Prince of Wales,
not too shabby, except that he's alone in the country
that he's just learning the language to and the first thing
that the Prince of Wales says to him 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 I.
Now I can bend to peel off my shoes, try to hook the tassled tips
into the emerald sails of my satin pantaloons.
Farewell sir monkey jacket, monkey red, adieu 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 breeches and a fine cravat.
But how? My tossed bed glows while I, I am a smudge,
a quenched wick, a twig shrouded in snow.
He does grow up to become a proper British gentleman,
but how does he get to Beethoven?
How do we get to that moment that started this whole thing?
It turns out that this young man, this young violinist, he really was,
by all accounts, a remarkable violinist, and was pushing himself.
He had heard that there was a composer in Europe
who was pretty remarkable and some people thought he was crazy
and too avante garde and some people thought he was amazing,
and so he decided he needed to go to Europe and find this Beethoven
and see if he could play for him, with him, whatever.
And so he took a leave of absence from the Court,
and he went to Europe and decided to seek him out.
And now we're getting closer to the moment that started all this.
He actually wangled away to meet Beethoven and stood in line
with a bunch of other musicians to play for him.
This is the moment for three seconds in the movie that we had watched
that started the whole thing.
What did Beethoven see in this young man?
By all accounts, and there aren't many,
they were great friends for about a few months.
Beethoven dropped everything he was doing to compose something for him.
Now you have to consider
at this time Beethoven is beginning to go deaf.
He is a composer.
This is the worst thing that can happen to you.
When he meets this violinist, he is already beginning to feel alienated
from his own world, because he can't hear half the time.
His hearing went in dribs and drabs and in screeches and howls,
and they struck up, in a certain way,
I think, a friendship of aliens.
This friendship was the moment that I chose to enter the book
and the first poem that I wrote from the book, as I said,
was Beethoven, and I'll read that now.
This is Beethoven thinking about Bridgetower.
"Vienna Spring" A lunatic angel has descended on Vienna.
No sooner had I given up on the violinist,
no more than a tiny querulous beast suited solely
for dilettante monarchs and their peg-legged street bakers do I make
the acquaintance of George Polgreen Bridgewater,
Mulatto musician/magician most monstrous.
After such delicious execution
of an afternoon's programs were decidedly pedestrian,
there's nothing to be done but repair to a neighboring Wirtschaft
where noch 'n mass, madl, I fear I must revise my former assessment,
though dipped in ink this Jacob has grappled the shining messenger
for glimpse of heaven and won the battle.
Entirely master of his instrument, he climbs the strings agile
as the monkeys from his father's land.
Ah, immortality has a new wrought human face.
How I love my handsome brash new friend, this twilit stranger
who has given me myself again.
So then why not everything and at once?
Four strings on a cord with the silence beyond, solo and chorus,
the declaimed and the whispered, all that I know and know I am losing,
have been losing, have lost, lost.
If you listen to the Kreutzer sonata, this sonata -- [applause]
That's your homework.
Go home and listen to the Kreutzer sonata, because what you will hear
at the beginning of that sonata is something
that everyone thought was insane at that time.
You'll hear not a violin playing to a piano accompaniment.
You will hear a solo violin, then you'll hear a solo piano,
and there's a call and response.
They talk to one another, back and forth
for quite a while before they come together.
Beethoven composed this sonata.   He finished it the night before.
There were parts which he could not copy
and he told Bridgetower just ad lib.   [laughter]
>> Rita Dove: He did.
It was so great that Beethoven, who was playing the piano, jumped up
and said do it again and he did.
The reports are that they watched each other and that Bridgetower,
who was a very flamboyant player, moved a lot,
and I thought there is a man going deaf at the piano watching his music
as much as he is hearing it.
You know, that's just such an amazing moment, and that gave me,
I guess, kind of the in into how their relationship worked
and how it fell apart.
Now, I'm going to skip a little bit, because I really wanted to get
to your questions, but I will tell you
that this friendship did not last very long and that,
according to the reports,
Bridgetower said he made a saucy remarkable to a girl,
because they were going out together, he and Beethoven,
and that Beethoven took offense,
and that's why he destroyed the dedication.
In one instant it disappeared.
Try as I might, I could not find any information about that saucy remark.
Right? What was it?   What could it have been?
I had to make it up.   I had to imagine that moment.
And the more I worked on the book the more, you know,
I worked with his life, I realized that I didn't want that saucy remark
to be encapsulated in a poem, per se.
I didn't want to give it that much importance,
because for Bridgetower it wasn't important until later, afterwards.
And so in the middle of this book there is a little farce,
kind of Mad Magazine-like farce, with Beethoven
and Bridgetower and that saucy remark.
Why a farce?
Because farces were very popular in Vienna then and, believe me,
my farce is tame compared to some of those.
Mine is exactly PG.
So, I would like to end with a poem near the end of the book
and then invite your questions, because it's a moment where facts,
real life, meets imagination again.
Bridgetower lived to be 80 years old.
He met Beethoven when he was in his 20's.
He led a respectable, by all counts, musician's life,
he just had missed that moment.
Perhaps he had more than 15 minutes of fame, but,
you know, it disappeared.
So he lived on and near the end I felt like I had lived with him
for so long and I was really kind of crazy at the end.
I was writing day and night and all that kind of stuff,
but I wanted to find out where he had died,
just to see the place where he had died.
He went back to London.
He did die impoverished, I found out.
The witness for his death was an illiterate person and she signed it
with an X, his next-door neighbor, and so armed with those maps
and a very patient husband and a semi-patient daughter,
we went back to London just to see the spot.
So, I will end with this poem, which is called "The End, with Mapquest"
and then we'll do questions.
[laughter] "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 reported what I knew I'd find there, families in townhouses,
a sensible Vauxhall parked askew in the carport behind the green grate?
Will 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 regents, I had to do something, crack a joke
or snap another useless photo of the Bellenden 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 Sambo
and glistening tiger running circles into golden oil.
Ah, Master B., little great man, tell me, how does a shadow shine?
[applause]   >> Rita Dove: Thank you.
If you have any questions, thank you so much.
If you have questions, please, I think there are microphones
>> Female Speaker: Actually, this is not a question,
but there was this really great book that came out a couple
of years ago called, "The Hemings' of Monticello" and in
that book we found out that Thomas Jefferson did know
about [unintelligible] and if you read that you'll find
out that he probably took Sally and if he didn't take Sally,
he came home and told her all about it.
>> Rita Dove: Well there.   [laughs] [laughter]
>> Rita Dove: I know that book came
out after I had found out about that.
It's really great.
>> Female Speaker: Okay, so then you did know?
>> Rita Dove: Okay, yeah.
We all kind of got the same source, I think.
>> Female Speaker: Okay, so my real question is last year
at this event I went to get a book signed by this lady named,
the lady that really got [unintelligible] Talbert.
>> Rita Dove: I'm sorry.   I can't hear.
>> Female Speaker: Oh, you wrote a poem about her --
>> Rita Dove: Yes.   Oh, Claudette Colvin.
Yes.
>> Female Speaker: And so I went to get my book signed by her
and I asked her how she liked your poem
and she said she'd never heard of you.
She'd never heard of your poem.   >> Rita Dove: Really?
Huh.
>> Female Speaker: And so my question was, my God,
how did you write that poem because that's how I learned about her?
>> Rita Dove: Oh, my gosh.
It's amazing how fact and life kind of get mixed together.
The poem to which she refers is a poem called, "Claudette Colvin Goes
to Work," and Claudette Colvin, of course, was one of the young women
who was arrested in Montgomery during the segregation disturbances
in the 50's, before Rosa Parks.
And the NAACP was very careful to choose,
they wanted to choose someone who would not be --
was unassailable, let's put it that way, and so they chose Rosa Parks
as a figurehead and not -- several people, Claudette as well.
I've always been fascinated by, I guess, taken by those
who don't make it into the history books, which is most of us.
You know, it's life.
You know, and a corollary to that, is of course, even for people
who happen to make it into the history books,
it's also every day you walk along and none of that gets
in the history books and that's what makes us love life so much.
And that's what started me on that.
I don't, you know, I just had to follow her, so thank you.
I'll go over here and then there.
>> Female Speaker: Do you have a favorite science fiction novel
that has a woman of color as the protagonist?
>> Rita Dove: Wow.   You've gotten very specific.
Do I have a specific science fiction novel that has a woman
of color as the protagonist?
No, I mean, I would suggest -- when I was growing up there were none.
Let's put it that way.
They were different colors, but they weren't women,
you know -- [laughter]
>> Rita Dove: They weren't necessarily the colors, you know,
and now my mind has gone completely blank, but see me afterwards.
I have a good suggestion, I just have to remember it, okay?
Okay. I was terrifically fascinated by Tuvok in Star Trek.
Tuvok, because he ran against type.
He was that -- you know, he looked like a black --
he was a Vulcan and he had no emotion
and I think I was fascinated by him.   >> Female Speaker: Hi.
I teach high school English and I have requested this year
for the first time ever to teach a creative writing class,
which excited me and terrified me at the same time, because when we get
to the poetry unit, I have such a tough time evaluating their work
in a constructive manner when it comes to poetry.
I grapple with what to say to them and to giving grades and such.
Have you had any opportunity to work with young writers
and what advice do you give them, what do you look for?
>> Rita Dove: I have had an opportunity
to work with young writers.
You know, the difficulty is that it is impossible to evaluate poetry
in a way that you can justify to a school board, we'll put it that way.
[laughter]
>> Rita Dove: And what happens is that then teachers are terrified
of teaching poetry, so they don't, or else, they try to find a way
to quantify it, which terrifies the students, because if you moved
by something, you're going to be moved beyond the language
to describe it or evaluate it.
I suggest to young writers that they, that they remember
that the writing, the heart that they bring
to the page, is never damaged.
If someone says that they don't understand the poem,
or they don't like it, that has nothing to do with the heart,
it has to do with the language, it has to do with the tool
that you're using, and to remember that, not to be discouraged,
but just work on the language, because what you're feeling,
is that this means you haven't gotten to it yet, and conversely,
if you're talking about interpreting poems,
remember that there is a vocabulary language that can help you start
to talk about what we all know is impossible to talk about.
But that's the same with music, it's the same with art,
it's the same with anything within the arts.
The thing about literature is that you use the same language
that is being employed as the medium,
and that's what screws this up.   Okay, thank you.
[applause]
>> Female Speaker: I'm a teacher also, and I just wanted
to compliment you, because when you talked about what you did,
how you were inspired by it, how you researched it,
that's exactly what we're trying to teach children to do,
so I think that whatever you can do helps you understand a little bit
more about everything else.
Where I struggle, and I sort of feel like her,
is knowing that young students do want to learn, you came from a town
with a fairly affluent middle class background, what do we tell kids
from poor communities that -- how do we do it?
I'm not just speaking from [unintelligible]
Support your habit, you mean?
>> Female Speaker: At least not make mom
and dad think the world has ended.
Because you're at this college before,
and you're trying to be a poet.   >> Rita Dove: You give them --
what you do is you give them the arsenal of give examples.
So many writes came out of lower class families
or illiterate families, and we don't even know that.
You give them, so they can go to their parents and say, "well,
you know, so and so was a poet, and, you know,
they came out of this kind of background."
And that's what you give them success with the parents begin
to understand, that it's not something totally new under the sun.
My father was the first person in his family,
the only one of his siblings, who went to college.
And they, you know, there's stories, you know, they unraveled his socks,
and their socks make him the sweaters so that he could go
to school, and he's the only one that had a chance.
You know, that gives you --   they have to hear these stories
so that they can also tell their parents, you know, love me,
support me, I believe in what I'm doing.
Okay. I believe -- I have.
Okay. I'm over time, and so if anyone joins me at the signing tent,
I'll answer your questions.   Thank you very much.
[ applause ]
>> Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.   Visit us at Loc.gov.