Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993 TAG: 9301050107
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID A. MAURER CHARLOTTESVILLE DAILY PROGRESS
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE (AP) LENGTH: Long
PULITZER-WINNING POET LOVES JOY OF MAKING WORDS
With her husband's surprise birthday party only hours away, Rita Dove was up to her elbows preparing food in her kitchen at her Tempe, Ariz., home when the phone rang."I was being very domestic and didn't want to be bothered with the telephone, so I had the answering machine on," said Dove, who is now a professor of English at the University of Virginia. "It was the chair of the English department at Arizona State University, where I was teaching.
"He said he knew I was home and told me to pick up," she recalled. "When he told me I had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, my first sensation was nothingness."
The telephone call came on April 16, 1987. Afterwards, nothing would ever be the same.
"Everything just shut down, because you can't comprehend something like that," she said. "For three or four minutes I had no sensation whatsoever. I don't think it hit me until about three days later."
The award was even more notable because Dove, 40, was one of the youngest writers to win the poetry prize and only the second black person to do so.
"I wasn't really thinking about winning anything at all, much less the Pulitzer Prize," she said. "It was my wildest dream come true."
Dove received the Pulitzer for "Thomas and Beulah," a collection of poems that are a chronology of the lives of her maternal grandparents.
From the first poem, where Dove describes how a riverboat's paddle wheel "churned mud and moonlight," to the last, where a ballerina "spins on her impossible toes," the book radiates imagery.
"Poetry, I believe, enjoys an intimate and dedicated audience, but it's not often in the limelight," said Dove, who began teaching at UVa in 1988. "What winning the Pulitzer did was catapult me into the public eye in a way that I never thought I would experience in my life.
"But after the first month or so of absolutely glowing, I wanted to get back to writing, because that's what gives me so much of my joy in life."
At an early age, Dove discovered the joy of making words carry the mental images from her mind to the outside world.
"My eighth-grade English teacher would set aside one period a week in which we could either write or read. What made all the difference was that we didn't have to show her what we wrote if we didn't want to.
"It was an incredible feeling of freedom and pleasure to be able to do that. It was a wonderful thing for her to do."
Now as a creative-writing teacher, Dove hasn't forgotten the importance of writing freedom and constructive guidance.
"As a teacher, I believe in criticism, but I don't believe in gratuitous cruelty. I think the hardest thing to do in a creative writing class is to actually get up and read your work and submit it to scrutiny.
"I think you can teach someone how to write, as you can teach someone how to play the piano well or how to be a ballerina.
"But the spark, actually, when you think of it, the real spark in any occupation is unteachable," she said. "That spark comes from someplace inside the person."
Although Dove said she still feels most comfortable with poetry, her first novel, "Through the Ivory Gate," was published this year by Pantheon Books.
Making the transition from poetry to prose wasn't easy.
"But as I got more into it, it felt more like writing poetry, just longer. Like poetry, there were paragraphs that had to be shaped, themes that had to be contained and given their own rhythm and sense of time.
"Before I began writing the novel, I used to think that novelists just used a lot of words. I since have gained a lot of respect for novelists. But in the end, writing the book didn't feel that different from writing poetry."
Dove said one of the things she is most concerned with in her writing is the way ordinary individuals react with the forces of history, how they fit in with it and how they look at it.
"I believe the only way human beings can understand life is the way they live it through that everydayness - through those very small details. Part of what I try to do in both my stories and poems is to reclaim that underside of history.
"For instance, `Thomas and Beulah' tells a story of two people growing old together through the great migration, Depression, World War II and into the '60s. All those events are there, but in the background.
"In `Through the Ivory Gate,' my main character is a black woman - a puppeteer - in her mid-20s. The novel takes place in the mid-1970s, right after the Watergate era. You see Watergate, and how it touches her, but it's from a distance. Yet, you get a sense of the mood of the time."
Dove recently completed a historical drama, "The Darker Face of the Earth," about a slave rebellion in South Carolina. It will be published in the fall.
Today the telephone no longer rings incessantly and the volume of mail is under control. She prefers this more sedate pace and relishes her writing time.
She's proud of her Pulitzer, but keeps the framed certificate lying on its back on a shelf. She thinks it would be too pretentious to hang it on a wall or even prop it up.
The prize, however, carries such import that its influence - and baggage - can last a lifetime and beyond.
"I still write from one soul to another," Dove said. "Winning a Pulitzer Prize has changed my writing only in the sense that now I may wait much longer before I show something to the public.
"I want to be absolutely sure that the work I'm giving to the public is what I want," she said. "One of the paradoxes of receiving a prize like the Pulitzer is that I can never be sure anymore whether something is really good or whether people take it for publication because it was from a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet."
Despite these few shortfalls, her exuberance and zest for writing have not diminished. If anything, they've increased.
"When I'm asked what my favorite work is, I like to say the one I haven't written yet," Dove said. "For me, choosing a favorite work would be like choosing a favorite child.
"As a writer, to give life to something that's not true in the world, but could have been, is tremendously exciting," she said. "When I write something and I get shivers, I know it's right."
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