Bill Moyers Journal (1993-1994); 1007; Poet Laureate Rita Dove

is what I wish for you, knowledge. I keep feeling like telling people you don't know what you're missing. To know we are responsible for the lives we change. Each hurt swallowed is a stone. Last words whispered to his daughter as he placed her fingertips lightly into the palm of her groom. I would like to be able to make poetry much more of a household worth it is now. If I could reduce the anxiety that people have about poetry, I think poetry will do the rest itself. If you can't be free. In the next hour, be a mystery. Port laureate Rita Dog. I'm Bill Boy. Funding has also been provided

by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a catalyst for change. The poet laureate of United States, Rita Dove. Lady freedom among us. Don't lower your eyes or stare straight ahead to where you think you ought to be going. As America's new poet laureate, Rita Dove's first official act was to write and redeploy and commemorating the bicentennial of the U.S. Capitol. With her stained cheeks and whiskers and heaped up trinkets, she has risen among us in blunt reproach. Lady freedom among us was her meditation on the statue of freedom being returned to the Capitol dome after its restoration. Having assumed the thick skin of this town, its gridded exhaust, its sunscorch and blear, she rests in her weathered plumage,

big bone, resolute. No choice but to grant her space, crown her with sky, for she is one of the many and she is each of us. She is our youngest Port laureate in a line that is included such intervals as Robert Pinworn, Robert Lowell, Wendelin Brooks, and Robert Frost. Success came early for Rita Dove. In 1987, at age 35, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Portery for Thomas and Bula, a series of poems about her grandparents. While her poems have won her a national following, she has also published a novel, a book of short stories, and just last month, a new play. Even as a child, back in Akron, Ohio, Rita Dove stood out, becoming a presidential scholar in high school, one of the 100 best students in the country. The recognition kept coming,

summa cum laude from Miami University in Ohio, a full-bright scholarship to Germany. She is married now to the German novelist Fred Vibon. In the last year alone, she was named Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Woman of the Year, Rita Dove. Celebrated in the popular press, and honored by the NAACP. He is all the world there is. Audience is delighted in the range of her subjects, and at the recent Geraldine R. Dodge Portery Festival in New Jersey, her versatility won ovation after ovation. Why do I remember the sky above the forbidden beach? She writes of painful moments from hard times past when segregation was law. Why does Anne Helen laugh before saying, look at that, a bunch of niggers, not a one-get-out for the others, pull him back. I don't believe her. Just as I don't believe they won't come

and chase us back to the colored only shore, crisp with litter and broken glass. Canary. She calls on the memory of the fabulous Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday's burned voice had as many shadows as lights, a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, the gardenia, her signature, under that ruined face. Take all day, if you have to, with your mirror and your bracelet of song. Fact is, the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can't be free, be a mystery. She captives the pride of poor dark women come to Paris from distant places. The island women of Paris, skim from curb to curb, like regatta,

from point neuf, to the Kaidu Lahab, in cool negotiation with traffic, each a country to herself transposed to this city by a fluke called imperial courtesy. It's better not to get in their way and better not look an island woman in the eye unless you like feeling unnecessary. She writes most often of family. After reading Mickey in the night kitchen for the third time before bed. A memory's bitter and sweet of tender moments of discovery between mother and child. My daughter spreads her legs to find her vagina. Hairless, this mistaken bit of nomenclature is what a stranger cannot touch without her yelling. She is three. That makes this innocent. Where pink she shrieks and bounds off. Every month she wants to know where it hurts

and what the wrinkled string means between my legs. This is good blood, I say, but that's wrong, too. How to tell her that it's what makes us black mother cream child that we're in the pink and the pinks in us. That was not easy for your audience. No, it's not easy for me either to read. And yet I think it's absolutely necessary to talk about these things. I think that particularly in the United States but in other societies as well, we have gotten to the point that we try to ignore our bodies or we're really ashamed of the fact that we're in bodies. And yet that is part of our very being. And if we can't talk about them, if we can't talk about our bodies, and actually what a marvelous thing a body is, think of it works.

To me, it's an amazing thing. There is everything so public now. We have the soft board on television night after night. We have Oprah and Donna Hugh and Heraldo all talking about sex and the techniques of sex. I mean, it seems like some of us old fashioned to think that maybe a private moment like that shouldn't go public. On the other hand, the audience responded and I have to report that my wife Judith, when she heard it said, that kind of wonderful intimacy between a mother and a child was not possible in her generation between her mother and her. Or between my mother and me. The real point of that poem, it's not the sexual organs or any of that. It is, as your wife said, it's the moment of intimacy between a mother and daughter. Something that one generation can teach in the next. And to bring the intimate public and still maintain the quality of intimacy

is something that poetry can do. Well, there is the ultimate sweetness that it seems to me is the commitment to, quote us, like mother, cream daughter. Was that a real moment between you and your daughter? Parts of it were real. It's real, but compressed time. It's not that this happened on one afternoon, but it's also being able to answer without embarrassment. The question said a child who doesn't have sense to be embarrassed, and they say, ask about their body. What is this and why does this person have that? And I don't. And to be able to answer those questions without making the child feel ashamed of something that I had to learn, it taught me something. But this occurred over a period of time and I've compressed it into one poem. When did the thought first come to you?

I can be a poet. Wow. Really, it was in college. I had been writing for a long time. I wrote when I was 10, 11. I wrote stories, poems. But I never thought of it as something I could do in the real world. It was my private thing. It was something that I did as my own enjoyment. And I think because I never really came in contact with another writer when I was young, it didn't occur to me that this was even possible to dream about. When I was in college and began taking creative writing courses, I met other people who were trying to write. It gradually dawned to me that I was doing everything to have my creative writing classes. I would re-schedule my entire course of events just to have this class.

And that's when I realized that I was trying to be what I thought society wanted me to be. I was trying to become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. That somehow was going to be a credit to my community, my race, the whole schmue. And what I really wanted to do was write. Were you a voracious reader as a child? Oh, I read everything I could get my hand on. I read the bags of cereal boxes. I had to have something to read all the time. And sometimes it was agony to be at the dinner table. We would say, don't bring a book to the table. This was one of the things we used to say in our family because everyone would be dragging a book along. One of the most valuable things that happened to me and my childhood was the fact that my parents allowed us, me and my siblings, to read whatever we wanted to. They encouraged reading, but there was a freedom involved in reading so that we felt that we had a whole world of books to explore. And some of my most wonderful memories

are wandering along the bookshelves and the salarium of our family house and thinking, what book are we going to read this time? And not knowing what's behind it. I like it for the first book. What's behind it? I think so many kids growing up today are afraid of books. They've become the much more depth of computers and with media. But I was shocked when I visited some classes at my daughter's school and realized that some kids were afraid of reading. That it wasn't joy, but it was somehow something that they were afraid they were going to fail at. And so this poem, the first book, is about encouraging someone to discover the joy of reading. The first book. Open it. Go ahead. It won't bite. Well, maybe a little. More a nip like a tingle.

It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started. Remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in. You'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world. Just the world as you think you know it. How is reading like eating? Well, one answer would be to say it nourishes the soul and the imagination. For me, reading as a child, it was a very physical sensation. I felt, I really felt like I was kind of chewing my way through the book. And also, I associated reading with eating. I would take snacks and match them to books. I know that sounds very odd, but... Match them to books. I would actually... There was a summer when I was about 12 or 13

when I had decided to read all of Shakespeare. I didn't make it. But this was one of those ambitious goals you have wondering that age. And so I began to read the plays. And I couldn't read them in one sitting. But I remember going through Macbeth and thinking that it was such a dark and bleak thing that I should only eat toast. And I think that because I was so toast or something, nothing extravagant had to be dry bread. And I think that was also because I got pulled so much into that world that I wanted to feel a little like it too. I can't try to engage all the senses. So it became a kind of game. What food? What snack am I going to eat when I read Romeo and Juliet? That's why I'm somewhere you talk about Shakespeare being pleasure. In the same way that food is delicious. Yes. And you were held? About 12 or 13 then. But you see, I had this wonderful advantage. No one had told me at that point that Shakespeare was supposed to be difficult.

It was on the shelf. It was a book there. No one asked me what, you sure you understand that? Or something like that. I picked it up. And the language was so beautiful already. It was so, it was like going on a ride. I remember my angel who told me once many years ago when I went to Stamps, Arkansas, where they're her hometown, that when she first read Shakespeare, an explosion went off into her mind. To imagine that a white man could ride like that. She said. She's definitely got soul, yes. Every word has its texture. It throws a shadow. Were your parents driving you? Were they putting these books in front of you? Were they saying, Rita, you're going to succeed? You're going to have to give your summers to Shakespeare? No. No, they never did that. But they did. They drove us in the sense that they said, education is the key to doing whatever you want to do. And they never even tried to dictate what we were going to be. They just insisted that we do our homework,

that we do the very best we can. The question always was, if we brought home a grade that was less than perfect, did you do the best that you could? Not, you know, how could you bring home this sea or beer? Did you do the best that you could? So that the standard became ourselves, you know? They were middle-class in Akronohau. In Akronohau. Education was the way, right? It was the way. They were also first-generation middle-class. My father was the only one from ten children who made it through high school, actually, into college. And for him, you know, this was absolutely true. The education was his way, you know, into a middle-class existence. And they were, my parents were very determined that we understand how important education was. They also showed us how enjoyable it was. And by example, as well,

my father had a dictionary next to his chair. And whenever he read anything, if he didn't know a word, he'd look it up. And we saw that. So we couldn't go to him and say, what does this word mean? We knew exactly what he would do. There's the dictionary. Look it up. Look at that in flashcards, which is one of the poems you've written about your childhood. Read this. Oh, yeah. That's a fun one. This is my daughter's favorite poem, because I made her do flashcards, too. I had sworn I would never do this to a child. I did flashcards down in Marshall, Texas, when I was growing up. Hold it up in a minute. Mm-hmm. It's important. Flashcards. In math, I was the whiz kid, keeper of oranges and apples. What you don't understand, master, my father said, the faster I answered, the faster they came. I could see one bud on the teacher's geranium, one clear bee sputtering at the wet pain. The tulip trees always dragged after heavy rain, so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.

My father put up his feet after work and relaxed with a highball and the life of Lincoln. After supper, we drilled, and I climbed the dark before sleep, before a thin voice hissed numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess, ten, I kept saying. I'm only ten. You felt that stress. Oh, there was a stress there. Mainly because flashcards really gave me stress because they never end. I didn't realize that they were really preparing me for life because things don't end in life. Was there really pain in your childhood? Oh, yes, sure. I was a very shy child. I think I still fight against shyness. I think that I was a good student, and there were some pain in schools, sometimes being teased.

For being good. For being good, being called Baraniac. Things like that. That kind of thing, wanting to be popular, wanting to fit in, but not ever really fitting in because I got those good grades. Was race ever the source of pain? Yeah, there were some incidents as well. I described one of them in my novel. A moment when a person, I thought was a very good friend of girl. A white girl. We played together. We usually went home from school together. Actually, it was related to grades because I had shown it in my report card. I had some deafening and good report cards. I was really not quite with it. She got angry and she called me Nigger. It was a moment when I thought,

but it all kind of crashed in. Sometimes you can have wonderful relationships with someone, and then it comes down to this bottom line. It was quite a revelation. Did you tell your parents? Yes, I did. I told them both. Had your father's life been hard? It had been hard. I didn't realize it at that point. My father kept his trials and tribulations secret from us. He kept them apart from us for many, many years. I did not know at that time that my father had been one of the top students in his graduating class, Masters in chemistry, and that all of his classmates got jobs with the entire rubber industry in Akron, which is the industry, and he was given the job of elevator operators for years. While he was raising his budding family, he was ferrying his classmates up and down on this elevator.

Finally, one of his professors from the university kept bugging the administration saying, this is absurd. There's this incredible student, and you know, you have him employed as an elevator operator, so that finally he became the first black chemist in the entire rubber industry. I knew nothing of all of that, not until I was in college, did I know about that. And my mother would sometimes say, when I thought that my father was insisting a little bit too much that we'd do it on our own and all of this stuff, and she would say, your father really means the best for you. He knows what it's like just trust me on this. That explains the poem that actually brought with me, the elevator man, 1949, this is about your father. Yes, it is. Elevator man, 1949. Not a cage, but an organ. If he thought about it, he'd go insane.

Yes, if he thought about it philosophically, he was a bubble of bad air in a closed system. He sleeps on his feet until the bosses enter from the paths of research and administration. The same white classmates he had helped through organic chemistry. A year ago, they got him a transfer from assembly line to corporate headquarters, a kindness he repaid by letting out all the stops, jostling them up and down the scale of his bitterness, until they emerge queasy, rubbing the backs of their necks, feeling absolved and somehow in need of a drink. The secret, he thinks to himself, is not in the pipe, but the slender breath of the piper. This is a man who went home in the evening, as you said, and read The Life of Lincoln. Yes, yes.

And he let out that little bitterness by giving him a rough ride on the elevator. So that he could, I think, return to his children and be a kind man. And it's a lesson that I don't know if I could have been. I thought about this. Could I have been a person not to talk about this in front of my children and what that did for us? I think what it did for us was that it gave us a sense of while we were growing up and while we were very fragile, a sense of believing that if we studied hard, we would get our due. And yet, being aware of discrimination, I mean, but still believing that things were changing so that we had confidence. And by the time I learned of it, the confidence was there, at least the confidence that I would always try to do my best, then to be aware of some of the kinds of obstacles that were there, didn't crush me. One of my favorites, and maybe the favorite of what you've done is also about your father.

I think it's about your father. The father walking out on the lawn. Yes, he is. This poem was written around the time when the first photographs from Saturn, from outer space, were coming back in. And you would see, they'll come across the screen, like one little slice at a time. A father out walking on the lawn. Five rings light your approach across the dark. You're lonely. Anyone can tell. So many of you trembling at the center, the thick dark root. Out here on a lawn, 21 years gone under the haunches of a neighbor's house, American beauties lining a driveway with the mirror image of your own. You wonder, waiting to be discovered. What can I say to a body that merely looks like you? The willow infatuated with its surroundings, quakes.

Not that violent orgasm, nor the vain promise of a rose relinquishing its famous scent all for you. No, not even the single brilliant feather, a blue-jay loses in flight, which dangles momentarily as your cemetery, above the warm eaves of your house. Nothing can change this travesty, this magician's skew of scarves, issuing from an opaque heart. Who sees you anyway, except at night, and with a fantastic eye, if only you were bright enough to touch. If only you were bright enough to touch. I think that all of us struggle with one or the other of our parents to understand them as people,

not just in their function as parent, but what made them what they were. And even while I didn't know that there were things my father had not told me about his life, I sensed that he carried in him just a host of pain and experiences that made him who he was. I felt that there was something that was holding back for some reason. And this poem is a lot about that trying, recognizing that and saying, you want to be able to talk to you on that very, very personal level. There's a sign of a fidescule there that says, one lives by memory, not by truth. What do you mean by that? Memory is very untruthful. It's very inaccurate.

What we remember, I think, is that that inform us and haunt us are actually probably very skewed. They aren't exactly what happened, but it's how we felt they happened. You know, you can get three people in the room and they can all talk about the same situation and for one, all they can remember is how embarrassed they felt when they said something silly. And the other person doesn't remember them saying it at all. Each person has their variant on the truth, which would be, I suppose, one truth would be, I suppose, a camera just recording the whole thing. But how we act in our lives is actually dependent about how we remember ourselves in different situations. Our sense of ourselves is formed by how we felt in certain situations, and that's not truth. It's a kind of truth, but it's not this absolute kind of truth. And what we make of the experience that has passed, how we interpret it, that's an ongoing processing. It's an ongoing process.

And I even think that even when we begin to understand how wrong we might have been about a certain situation, we still carry the memory of how we felt about it when we thought it was a certain way. That makes it also, that also helps to make understandable how we react in certain situations. So what's really strong in us is memory. Truth isn't. The poet James Merrill said that one only knows eternity in a grain of sand and one only knows history in the family around the table. Is that why you write so often about your family? That's so well put. Yes, I think that we understand history through the family around the table and those who aren't there anymore, but yet who are kind of called in from the past. And I think that particularly in the poems in Thomas and Bula.

About your grandparents? About my grandparents. One of the things I was trying to do was to show how grand historical events can be happening around us, but we remember them in relationship to what is happening to us at that particular moment. What happens to the individual? The idea of how an individual fits into the flux of history has always fascinated me. How did you come to know about their lives? I mean, they were dead when they were not when you were child. Well, my grandfather died when I was about 13 or 14 and my grandmother then died when I was in college by that time. But by the time I began writing the poems, they were both dead. They were great storytellers, so. And of course, a lot of the stories, I have remembered because of the impatience of youth you hear them telling stories. Oh, another story. And after they were gone, though, I began, those stories floated back to me. And I found that I wanted to write more about my grandparents and a way to learn who they really were.

Again, who were these people that were my grandparents? Not just in their function as my grandparents, but as individuals who had made a life and brought my mother into the world. But you had to create some of the events. I mean, you couldn't know everything that's in these poems. Oh, yes. So what you do is to get us into their world, into their emotions, not necessarily into the literal truth of their lives. Exactly. I mean, obviously I couldn't, I was not even there. Could I, some of these things that would have to be imagined at some level. Again, it's that idea that memory is stronger than truth. It began with an actual event. It began with a story that my grandmother had told me about my grandfather coming north on a river boat. And that story, which was already mysterious to me, that because I had no idea that my grandfather had been part of a song and dance team working on a paddle boat.

All this romantic stuff. I had no idea that his best friend had drowned swimming in the Mississippi River and that he had drowned because an island sunk. I said, Grandma, islands don't sink. And she says, well, this one did. And with those kind of discrepancies, that was what I was left with. This is the poem, the event, this is that part of the poem called the event. Yes. Okay. Let's get it as it is. Page 141. This is the event. This is the event. The event. Ever since they'd left the Tennessee Ridge with nothing to boast of but good looks and a mandolin, the two Negroes leaning on the rail of a river boat were inseparable. Lem plucked to Thomas's silver falsetto. But the night was hot and they were drunk. They spat where the wheel churned mud and moonlight. They call to the tarantulas down among the bananas

to come out and dance. You're so fine and mighty. Let's see what you can do, said Thomas, pointing to a tree-capped island. Lem stripped, spoke easy. Lem's chestnuts, I believe. Dove quick as a gasp. Thomas, dry on deck, saw the green crown shake as the island slipped under, dissolved in the thickening stream. At his feet, a stinking circle of rags, the half-shell mandolin, where the wheel turned the water gently shurred. I'll wait you, your grandfather felt some guilt over having suggested to Lem that he swam out there. Yes, I think so. And that was the question that drove, in fact, the other poems into existence. The question for me was,

how did this man who must have been racked with guilt over the death of his friend? How did he come to terms with this guilt in his life? How did he become then this sweet, wonderful, quiet man that I knew as my grandfather? So I was writing poems, and we're working toward the man that I knew. Did it in part, if one reads this, by falling in love with your grandfather? One of my favorites in Thomas and Bueller's courtship. That resonates with a lot of people I've heard talk about it. Courtship. Fine evening, may I have the pleasure to open down the block waiting for what? A magnolia breeze, someone to trot out the stars. But she won't set a foot in his turtled-of-nash. It wasn't proper. Her pleated skirt fanned softly,

a circlet of arrows. King of the crawfish in his yellow scarf, Mandolin belly pressed tight to his hound's tooth vest. His wrist flicks for the pleats, all in a row, sighing. So he wraps the yellow silk, still warm from his throat around her shoulders. He made good money. He could buy another. A net flies in his eye, and she thinks he's crying. Then the parlor festooned like a ship, and Thomas twirling his hat in his hands, wondering how did I get here? China pugs guarding a fringed set tea, where a father, half Cherokee, smokes and frowns. I'll give her a good life. What was he doing, selling all for a song? His heart fluttering shut, then slowly opening.

All of those machinations we go through, you know, for courtship. And I really wanted to try to get across how you can be doing one thing, and your mind is going off in a thousand different directions, like, you know, well, I make good money. I can get another scarf. I'll give her this scarf, because he's trying to convince her to loosen up to him, and how chance can fly into our most important moments, like a net flying in his eye makes him look like he's crying, and she softens because of that, you know. Suddenly, there he is, proposing and asking for her hand. What about Bula? What's your favorite in there about her? Well, one of my favorites about Bula is one where she's ironing in the back room of a dress shop. She's gone back to help out with the family finances. And she's kind of angry, because she was not allowed to sell the clothes in the front room of a dress shop.

What she does in that poem and the reason why I like it so much is she has taken to reading books in the library about going to Paris. She's always wanted to go to Paris. She knows she's not going to get there now, but in order to feed her dream, she makes do with what she has. She goes to the public library and starts reading up on all things French. And that kind of resilience, you know, of the spirit saying, well, I'm going to get my friends some way. That's what I like about that poem. The great palaces of Versailles. Nothing nastier than a white person. She mutters as she irons alterations in the back room of Charlotte's dress shop. The steam rising from a cranberry wool comes alive with perspiration and stale evening of Paris. Swamp, she born from. Swamp, she swallow.

Swamp, she got to think again. The iron shoves gently into a gusset, waits until the puckers bloom away. Beyond the curtain, the white girls are all wearing shoulder pads to make their faces delicate. That laugh would be autumn, tossing her hair in imitation of a call. Bula had read in the library how French ladies at court would tuck their fans in a sleeve and walk in the gardens for air, swaying among lilies, lifting shy layers of silk they dropped excrement as daintily as handkerchiefs. Against all rules, she had saved the lining from a botched coat to face last year's grey skirt. She knows whenever she lifts a knee, she flashes crimson. That seems legitimate.

But in the book, she had read how the Cavalier amused themselves wearing powder and perfume and spraying yellow borders knee high on the stucco of the Orhanjari. A hangar clatters in the front of the shop. Bula remembers how even autumn could lean into a set tee with her ankles crossed, sighing, I need a man who protect me while smoking her cigarette down to the very end. Did you feel that you had gotten to know your grandparents from riding above them? I did. I really did. It was such a boon for me. I was riding these poems in the end. I realized that it was like talking to my grandparents all over again. I got them back. Not only was there a book, but there was the family back again too.

I also talked with my mother on the phone. I was living in Arizona at the time. We talked every weekend. She knew I was riding these poems. And I didn't know what I was looking for. She didn't know what I was looking for. But we talked and talked about her childhood and her parents. She never asked to see a poem to see if I was doing justice to them. And that trust too was something that was a wonderful plus in the midst of all of this. What does riding a poem do for you? I can't imagine living a life of writing. But riding a poem for me means putting a name to a face to memories. It means calling up emotions that I don't quite have a handle on and by writing about them,

understand them a little better. It also means reaching out and connecting with someone else. I think without that, it wouldn't be worth it for me. It wouldn't have the same pull. Because the final thing is if someone else can come up to me and say, I know exactly what you mean. Or that happened to me too. Or you know that could have been my grandmother. And I've heard that from people who, you know, white middle class people from the Pacific Northwest as far away from Americans possible. And to feel like we as human beings are more like than we are different. That we have emotions that we can connect with. That is the final thrill of writing. But for me to so many of us in this country is an alien experience. I know. And it's so unfortunate. I keep feeling like telling people you don't know what you're missing. And I think part of my self-appointed mandate I think is poet laureate,

is to tell people and to help them see that poetry is not something that is above them or that is somehow distant. But it's part of their very lives that it is enjoyable. And that maybe that unfortunate experience they had somewhere along the line where they had to interpret a poem instead of being allowed to first appreciate it. Maybe I can help to reverse that trend just a little bit. I remember when Lyndon Johnson sponsored a Post-Roll Festival at the White House and the poet Robert Loa was invited. You were just five years old, I think, about that time. And Loa rebuked the president and came out against the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson said, I don't even do with any poets. Don't bring me any poets. And the question is, what does poetry have to say to power? Poetry is a way, I think, of connecting our almost inarticulated emotions

all of our guilt, all of our fears and joys, as a way of articulating them so that we can recognize them. I think very often we may have emotions inside of us we may have feelings or desires which get squelched just in the daily life. A poetry by making a stop or making a stop for a moment and taking it a little slower gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other. In that way, the poetry becomes a voice to power that says, power is not the end-all or be-all. At the other end of this, the connection is human being to human being. The connection is what are we doing to make the lives of everyone better and not just materially, but spiritually as well. And I think that that's the reason why poetry has often been considered dangerous or we'd want to put it off to the side.

It's discomforting for power because it louses up the gears. Someone said a long time ago that you can't really compare phrasing but you can't have a republic unless you first kill the poets. Well, the meaning implicit in that is that poetry may be exist to tell the truth. Yes. That's what makes poetry so authentic. In most cases, it does tell the truth. And power, politicians, that's the one commodity in this town that they just assume be in short supply. Well, because truth is difficult and slow and truth tends to make, if you're trying to affect change, truth can get in the way in a funny way. I mean, talking about politics. And another thing I think about poetry that makes it so potentially dangerous is that it can tell the truth but it tells it in a way that convinces. You cannot set it aside. I think that people can bear the truth. I think, in fact, we long for it. We long for the truth in all of its contradictions

because I think there is no simple truth either. And that truth means sacrifice. But they also mean enriching of one's inner life. And I think that the American people want that. And they know that very often they aren't getting it. Not only in politics, but they aren't getting it just in the kind of entertainment that they're being fed. And there's this incredible longing to find something that really matters, that really, really helps them in their lives. Last fall at the White House, you had before you the assembled literary cultural artistic figures of our time, the President and the First Lady, the Vice President, and Mrs. Gore. And you read them a very strange poem about a horror. What was that poem? That poem was parsley. It's called parsley. And it is based on a historical event

that occurred in Dominican Republic in 1957. The dictator at the time, Rafael Tujillo, had executed 20,000 Haitian blacks who used to work side by side in the cane fields with the Dominicans. He did this in a very bizarre and ultimately creative manner. He had them pronounce the word all the cane workers, which is the Spanish word for parsley. Those who could not pronounce it correctly, and the Haitians, speaking French, had a kind of Creole-like Spanish where they didn't roll there are as it came out as an L instead of that trilled R. And whoever then said, Pella, he lives there. Pella, he was Haitian, was executed. That he had them pronounce their own death sentence. This ultimate little twist and cruelty was what haunted me. And the poem deals with that. How he arrives at that moment. And you read this at the one hand?

Yes, I did. I read it because I thought that it was actually very apropole. Here I was at the administration level in the power. And I wanted to talk about the uses to which power have been put. But not only that, I wanted to talk about what's really necessary in all avenues of life, is to be able to imagine the other person, no matter what you're doing. Because that's a way also, that's a way of understanding and not just carte blanche, dismissing something. In that poem, I try to make us understand how drew he or arrived at that word. To not just to say this was a horrible dictator, I don't want to think about it. But to actually make us realize that evil can be creative. Evil is not stupid. It can be, in fact, as intelligent as what we imagine good to be.

And we have to realize that if we're going to ever fight evil. Would you read that poem now? Sure. Will that be the last one? All right. The poem is in two parts in each has a title. Parsley, the cane fields. There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace. It's feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp, the cane appears to haunt us and we cut it down. El General searches for a word. He is all the world there is. Like a parrot imitating spring, we lie down screaming as rain punches through and we come up green. We cannot speak an R. Out of the swamp, the cane appears. And then the mountain we call in whispers, Catalina. Catalina.

The children nod their teeth to arrowheads. There is a parrot imitating spring. El General has found his word, periahil, who says it lives. He laughs teeth shining out of the swamp. The cane appears in our dreams lashed by wind and streaming. And we lie down. For every drop of blood, there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp, the cane appears. The palace. The word the General's chosen is parsley. It is fall when thoughts turn to love and death. The General thinks of his mother, how she died in the fall, and he planted her walking cane at the grave, and it flowered. Each spring's stolidly forming four star blossoms. The General pulls on his boots.

He stomps to her room in the palace, the one without curtains, the one with a parrot in a brass ring. As he paces, he wonders, who can I kill today? And for a moment, the little knot of screams is still. The parrot, who has traveled all the way from Australia in an ivory cage, is coy as a widow practicing spring. Ever since the morning his mother collapsed in the kitchen, while baking skull-shaped candies for the day of the dead, the General has hated sweets. He orders pastries brought up for the bird. They arrive, dusted with sugar on a bed of lace. The knot in his throat starts to twitch. He sees his boots the first day in battles splashed with mud and urine, as a soldier falls at his feet amazed. How stupid he looked at the sound of artillery. I never thought it would sing,

the soldier said, and died. Now the General sees the fields of sugarcane lashed by rain and streaming. He sees his mother smile, the teeth nod to arrowheads. He hears the Haitians sing without ours as they swing the great machetes. Catalina, they sing. Catalina, Nimatle, Miemolle, and Welton. God knows his mother was no stupid woman. She could roll an R like a queen. Even a parrot can roll an R. In the bare room, the bright feathers arch in a parody of greenery as the last pale crumbs disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone calls out his name and a voice so like his mother's, a startled tear splashes the tip of his right boot. My mother, my love in death.

The General remembers the tiny green sprigs, men of his village war in their capes to honor the birth of a son. He will order many this time to be killed for a single beautiful word. What was the reaction when you read this at the White House dinner? It was very interesting. I think when I began the poem, when I introduced it, there was a moment of tension in the world. It was, after dinner, an event and I think people expected to be entertained and that they were worried that this was somehow going to be politically incorrect. But that changed fairly rapidly. I felt that if I were invited to the White House, I should really show what poetry can do and that, in fact, it covers so many different aspects

of human joy and triumph and tragedy. And that was one reason for doing this poem. In the end, I think it was very well received. So poetry does have something to say to power? Oh, yes. I think it does. How would you like to change the world, the world of Washington, the world that all of us live in, if you could? As a poet, I would like to be able to make poetry much more of a household word than it is now. If I can reduce the anxiety that people have about poetry, I think poetry will do the rest itself. What it does for us, I think my angel who mentioned once that poetry makes us more tender to each other. A little bit of tenderness in this city would go a long way toward, I think, even helping policy decisions, all sorts of things. If I can, I'll be a, you know, I'll be a Godfly if I have to be on the side, you know,

of government. But I would much rather be just a voice contributing and reminding people that we have an interior life that we often don't talk about, because it's not expedient, because it isn't cool, because it's potentially embarrassing, but that without that interior life, we are shells, we have nothing, and we have to remember it, honor it, and occasionally listen to it. From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., this has been a conversation with Port laureate Rita Dove. I'm Bill Mortier. It's a wonderful example. Music Music

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