Good evening.
When my treasured friend and colleague, Diana Delgado,
the Literary Director of the Poetry Center,
who is a brilliant writer in her own right
and has added so much vibrancy to our creative community here,
invited me to offer a very brief introduction of poet
and trailblazer Rita Dove, the quite singular Rita Dove,
I thought, wow, this is the moment
I survived the pandemic for.
An incredible opportunity.
It is truly my good fortune to stand before you tonight.
Of course, Rita Dove requires no introduction.
In 1993, she was the youngest poet
and first African-American poet ever
to be named US Poet Laureate, and served
two terms during which she strove
to bring access to the literary arts
to a wider range of communities.
She is a Pulitzer Prize winner, she
has been awarded 29 honorary doctorates.
Rita Dove is the only poet honored with both the National
Humanities Medal, and the National Medal of Arts.
In 2021, she was awarded the gold medal for poetry
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Rita Dove is the author of several collections of poetry,
including Collected Poems 1974 to 2004, which was shortlisted
for the National Book Award, American Smooth,
On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the Pulitzer Prize
winning collection Thomas and Beulah.
In addition to writing a novel, short stories, and a play that
was produced at the Kennedy Center
for Performing Arts in Washington, DC,
she edited the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry.
Her recent works include Sonata Mulattica and Playlist
for the Apocalypse, which Guernica Magazine Review calls
"a beautiful collection in which Dove takes us from the smallest
moments of redemption to catastrophic failures
of the human soul."
In a 2021 interview for World Literature
Today, Rita Dove observed that poetry
is the repository of our collective emotional memory.
In a poem published that same year, Incantation of the First
Order, Dove offers the lines: "to those inclined toward
kindness I say, come out of your houses drumming.
All others beware.
I have discarded my smile, but not my teeth."
A most appropriate response to the difficult social,
cultural, and political circumstances
in which we currently find ourselves the urgency of now
in a complex tango with always pending futures.
Rita Dove understands the art of magnifying moments,
big and small, into eternity.
She sketches the ordinary, with pristine precision
that is at once familiar and otherworldly.
Powerfully, she wields archive and ephemera
into critical magic.
I encourage you to discover yourself
in the world Rita Dove's word magic has crafted.
Read as many of her poems as you can.
And Dove's 1992 poem, a personal favorite,
Demeter's Prayer to Hades, Dove speaker
tells us there are no curses, only mirrors held up
to the souls of gods and mortals.
Tonight may Rita Dove's presence among us conjure
and stir our collective emotional memory.
May this reading invoke our spirits and our imaginations
in ways that reflect back to us.
The humanity yet unrealized which
we owe each other in pursuit of our continued survival.
It is my great honor and pleasure
to welcome the legendary poet Rita Dove.
[APPLAUSE]