RITA DOVE: “We aren’t lost”

To bring together her latest poetry collection, former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove printed out poems that were written between 1989 and 2020, spread them across the floor, and walked among them to see what might tie them together. Where her last collection focused on the retelling of a historical narrative, this collection focuses on a multifaceted past, present, and future of nature, nation, and self. The resulting collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse, features six distinct but linked sections which explore the public and the personal. Dove invites readers into a deeply intimate space in this book, revealing that she was diagnosed more than two decades ago with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, a condition which required her, among other things, to revise her writing practice. The section of the book that grapples with her illness, “Little Book of Woe,” works in conversation with others, ranging from a song cycle that “bear[s] witness to the last fifty-odd years of American history” to a suite of poems in the voice of a ruminating insect.

The collection moves as a playlist should. There’s a dynamic approach to sound, subject, and form as the poet asks us to consider how all of these rub together to make music, like crickets. As Dove delves into conversations about history and violence, the body and mortality, language and time, there is an inventive playfulness, a welcoming into this space as Dove returns to her voice in her work.

Dove is the author of several collections of poetry, including Collected Poems: 1974-2004, 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 the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, she edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry. In 1993, she was the youngest 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.

I met Rita Dove for the first time in 2016 on the rooftop of the Graduate Hotel in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the launch of a mural by David Guinn, which featured her poem “Testimonial.” She was warm, welcoming, and full of light. I spent the next year working for her at the University of Virginia, where she serves as the Commonwealth Professor of English. When I pulled up the winding driveway to