Rita Dove

Biography

Rita Dove is a former US Poet Laureate (1993–1995) and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon, 1986). Her most recent poetry collections are Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 2021), Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (Norton, 2016), Sonata Mulattica (Norton, 2009), and American Smooth (Norton, 2004). Dove is sole editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). Her honors include the 2011 National Medal of Arts. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

See Work

POETRY / Spring 2014

Ode to My Right Knee

By Rita Dove

Oh, obstreperous one, ornery outside of ordinary
protocols; paramilitary probie par 

excellence: Every evidence
you yield yells. 

POETRY / Spring 2009

Nomadia

By Rita Dove

In search of pasture, a place to lie down in.
Back to the mother breast
or a dream of return

POETRY / Spring 2009

Paris, Panting

By Rita Dove

They say leap-year babies
are out-of-time, moony. I’m really
just two, closer to the womb

POETRY / Spring 2009

What Doesn’t Happen

By Rita Dove

The notion that the carriage wheels clattering through Paris
remind him of the drums from the islands in his father’s tales:
clickclack sputterwhir—he could make a song of it, dance

POETRY / Spring 2009

Black Billy Waters, at His Pitch

By Rita Dove

All men are beggars, white or black;
some worship gold, some peddle brass.
My only house is on my back.

 

POETRY / Spring 2009

Pretty Boy

By Rita Dove

Can’t say he walked the walk.
Talked it, but everybody
did that, everybody

POETRY / Spring 2009

Floating Requiem

By Rita Dove

Summer ended powerfully—as if God
had snapped a branch from his mightiest oak
and thundered: “Enough.” The sky dimmed.

POETRY / Winter 2005

Brightening

By Rita Dove
      Which face to choose?
        Start in the left-hand corner—and speak to it
              as if to a flock of birds
POETRY / Spring 1980

The House Slave

By Rita Dove

The first horn lifts its arm over the dew-lit grass
and in the slave quarters there is a rustling—
children are bundled into aprons, cornbread