Rita Dove stood transfixed by the volume of poetry in her hands, the cover of which read Residue of Song, by Marvin Bell. The twenty-one-year-old future United States poet laureate, who would become the first African-American woman to bear that title, looked up suddenly at the stranger breaking her concentration. “That book—I don’t like it so much,” the man curtly declared, furrowing his brow. The 1973 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference played host to many outspoken colorful characters, and this was one of them, Dove realized. After listening with a bemused look while she vigorously defended the book in her hand, the man inquired about the location of the conference bookstore. While leading him there, she continued to praise what she insisted was a powerful and searching work by an underappreciated poet. Several days later at the conference, she crossed paths with the opinionated stranger again. “She didn’t know it was me,” Bell later explained. Dove was “a bit baffled” by his ruse, realizing he had baited her into defending—with great enthusiasm—his own work.1
Four years later, in 1977, during her second year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dove appeared in Bell’s poetry class. Seated in the back row were two morose first-year students, Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo, who marveled at Dove’s poise. When she was not holding forth with supreme confidence, Dove coolly “painted her fingernails in a rainbow of colors in class,” to the consternation of her instructor and the silent approval of her classmate Jorie Graham. This display of unapologetic individualism presented a new challenge to the status quo of the Workshop. Decades later, when Dove was named poet laureate, Graham only half-jokingly invoked her in-class nail painting ritual as a force of institutional change: “I hope she does it in the poet laureate’s office. It would be good for the office.”2
Years after graduating, Cisneros told Dove she admired her for consistently contributing to discussion despite an environment Cisneros found so intimidating that she “gave up and didn’t say anything.” Although she knew her comments were likely to draw condescending stares and snide remarks, “she forced herself to say something in every class,” which “took all her courage.”3 Dove’s confidence derived from a sophisticated European frame of reference, gleaned from a Fulbright fellowship she held at the University of Tübingen the year before arriving at the Workshop in 1975. While there, she became fluent in German and spoke it confidently in mostly white intellectual social circles. Studying abroad in the picturesque college town offered her “a different perspective on Iowa. Had I not gone to Tübingen I might have been intimidated by Iowa,” but the experience of going “to Europe first, where no one knew me, and where I had to get along in a different language,” fortified her with “much more self-confidence than I had before.”4 Tübingen imbued her with cosmopolitanism beyond her years. She was all of twenty-two when she moved into her self-described “dive” apartment across the Iowa River from the Workshop.5 Her Fulbright also encouraged new connections with foreign scholars at Iowa, including Fred Viebahn, who would play an instrumental role in her personal and aesthetic development. The social and cultural diversity missing from the regular Workshop she found not only in the intellectual and creative companionship of Viebahn—which turned romantic—but in an unlikely institutional nexus that was the invention of Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh in the late 1960s: the International Writing Program.
The “Workshop Poem”
Dove began her pivotal first year by devouring the works of the authors cited during workshop sessions. “I’d hear names” and take her cue, thinking, “I’ve never heard of these poets before, better read them.” Even when “someone would not like a certain poet,” Dove made a point of reading their work too. Despite her remarkable proficiency in German language and literature, she became acutely aware of “how naive” she was and how little she had read compared with her classmates.6 Afternoon Workshop classes typically adjourned up the hill to the Airliner bar on Clinton Street where “the talk was poetry” in an atmosphere that seemed to intensify competitive jockeying for position initiated in class. “It was serious stuff” consisting of allusions to classical literature and mythology, with students rattling off lengthy passages from memory. This was a group in which most “people knew poems by heart.”7 Her “short-cut reading list” became a lifebuoy.8
As her exposure to literature expanded, Dove diligently strived to perfect her workshop assignments. But in the process, her writing fell into a trap, and she soon realized “what everybody says is true” about “an Iowa Writers’ Workshop poem” being a stock literary product created with factory-like efficiency. To her horror, she discovered herself writing verse “that sounds like it came from Iowa,” unconsciously “slipping into that [habit] easily.” The high-stakes workshop sessions had bent her craft through “positive reinforcement,” she explained. “If people in the workshop like your poem you try to do something like that the next time,” until it becomes an unconscious reflex engrained in the creative process. She soon found herself “starting to write these kinds of safe poems that don’t take risks, and as a consequence, after Iowa, for over a year I really didn’t write any poems.”9 Dove’s dedication to achieving the program’s standard for success had inadvertently homogenized her craft and dampened her creative spark. The effects of poetry workshops are visible in her self-conscious use of “the strict forms of the sonnet and villanelle [that] are integral” to her earlier work, as critic Renee Shea points out. It was not until years after the Workshop that she expanded into “improvisation and individual expression” through the rhythms and sounds associated with music and dance.10
The transition was not without its challenges. Her diligent work ethic—writing daily from midnight to dawn until she drifted off, arising again before noon to resume her creative thrust—drove her repeatedly to attempt to resuscitate her poetry. But outside the context of writing for workshop, the flaw in her otherwise technically sound and fastidiously safe verse was that it lacked a voice with resonance. False starts abounded. She “didn’t finish any poems” in the year following graduation because “whenever I tried to write one, it didn’t sound like me.” To her revulsion, “it sounded like a poem from some composite person,” one unmistakably identifiable in the group identity of her poetry workshop classes.11 That collective force was one to be reckoned with, as it actively discouraged experimentation while encouraging conformity through a Skinnerian system of punishment and reward. She “felt pretty paralyzed after the Workshop,” sensing at every turn “the Workshop looking over my shoulder.” By deliberately crossing over into fiction, she undid her Workshop training to regain her poetic voice. Although she vowed to keep that prose fiction in a drawer, to “let it rest in peace,” she later published it as her first short story collection, Fifth Sunday, in 1990, and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate, two years later.12
In light of Dove’s creative paralysis after graduation from the Workshop, her MFA thesis bears the unmistakable imprint of the Workshop pedagogy and curriculum. Her schooling interfered with her education, as Mark Twain would have it, through training “in sensation and the manipulation of representation in The Image,” according to Robert McDowell. “The standard lesson plan, devised to reflect the ascendancy of Wallace Stevens and a corrupt revision of T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative, instructed young writers to renounce realistic depiction and offer it up to the province of prose.” The result was a narrowing of poetry into “subjectivity and imagination-as-image; it has strangled a generation of poems.” Dove’s peers became pretending play-actors, or “dissemblers,” in this manner, a tendency she simultaneously resisted and replicated.13
Between flashes of brilliance, her MFA thesis is a derivative youthful imitation of the styles and subjects of H.D. and Dove’s thesis supervisor, Louise Glück. Her riddle poems, for example, are the products of a Workshop exercise in writing poetry without naming the subject. “Riddle” demonstrates her mastery of the assignment. “When I see you, my intestines/ squirm,” it begins, followed by a series of clever images ending with her subject’s violent end: “Rain drives your family to the sidewalks,/ where their split pink tongues accuse each pedestrian of murder.” The poem remains straitjacketed both by the parameters of the assignment and Dove’s response to it with this gratuitous teacher-pleasing confection, a graduate version of her earlier acculturation into the role of high school honor student. Much of her thesis amounts to such well-executed classroom exercises as “Riddle: The Vase.” In it, Dove strains for the classical imagery of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “It is the graven image of a poem/ whose clay feet are natural,/ who stands on a waxed table,” the pun on anthropomorphic and poetic feet all too conspicuous as she rounds out the portrait in “its dirt belly stuffed with tulips/ or peacock feathers.”14 Such striving yet constrained work possessed enough nascent creative power to meet her instructor’s expectations and withstand the scrutiny of her peers. But soon after graduation, it became clear to her that such success was hollow. Catering too obediently to institutional demands, she realized, threatened to domesticate her expansive international vision, which eventually revolutionized the world of poetry.
The German Connection
By her second year in the program, Dove grew increasingly discontented with the Workshop’s American literary focus, which proved too narrow for her worldly purview. Crossing over to the eclectic and diverse culture of the International Writing Program, if only informally as a charter member of sorts, infused her with new vigor. American perspectives on race had tried her patience. She recalled standing out for all the wrong reasons: “I was the only Black person in the Iowa workshop at the time,” which burdened her with “other people’s guilt.” Even without that burden, “being a student in a creative writing workshop is a very naked experience,” leaving young idealistic minds vulnerable to damaging criticism. Add to this the predicament of being “the only person representing any other culture, and you’re setting yourself up doubly,” she explains. Guilt can play havoc with critical standards. She noticed that her peers lowered their aesthetic standards when her poetry was up for review. With her race in mind, “they started making allowances” for her identity “as a hyphenated poet—as an African-American-woman-poet, or a Latin-American-gay-poet, or whatever.” When the burden of guilt mounts, suddenly “the rigor drops; it’s this condescension which is so insulting, because as a serious writer one approaches the art with all the rigor of non-hyphenated poets.” At workshop sessions, she could see the pattern repeatedly in her fellow students, who would not “talk about the poem in terms of techniques or its aesthetic,” but only “the subject matter.” Thus “poems dealing specifically with my heritage,” she attested, “always got the worst,” as in the least helpful, “comments, because people could not find a way around the guilt.”15
The third floor of the English-Philosophy Building was home to the International Writing Program (IWP), where Dove found welcome relief from such condescension. Fred Viebahn, a young German poet, epitomized the prevailing attitude toward her poetry among scholars visiting from abroad through the IWP, a non-degree-granting program that offered housing and office space for up to five months at a time. Viebahn was among the IWP fellows, an eclectic blend of twenty-five visitors per year who occupied an entire floor of the Mayflower dormitory north of campus by City Park on Dubuque Street. They came from all over the world, representing more than twenty different nations at any given time. Paul Engle, along with Hualing Nieh, raised over $3 million from 1967 through the early 1990s, which allowed more than seven hundred writers to immerse themselves in the literary culture of Iowa City.16 Viebahn was a beneficiary of this sinecure, which afforded him an extended period unburdened by teaching requirements to pursue his creative endeavors, conduct research and translation projects, and explore the region. The primary purpose was to offer writers a creative space and an opportunity to share their nation’s literature and their latest projects at a two-hour non-credit seminar held once a week on a rotating basis. Dove attended these seminars, drawing stimulation from the rich array of literatures and authors on display. In this environment, she could circulate with scholars who were not American and thus bore none of the guilt of the U.S. slave-holding past when interacting with her. IWP scholars not only treated her on equal footing, they also took active interest in her German proficiency as a valuable skill otherwise overlooked in the Workshop’s limited curriculum and culture.
Dove noticed at Iowa “that everything ran by clique. The fiction writers stuck together, the poets stuck together,” and even “the wrestlers had a bar” and “the visual artists had a bar.” The social subdivisions were impermeable, a caste system that seemed “crazy” to her. The urge to explore other groups was sacrilege, an unpardonable sin that was actively denied. “I remember trying to get a couple of the graduate students in the Writers’ Workshop to come to some of the seminars” for the IWP, she recalled. To her shock, “they shied away,” seeming “not to want to see and hear from writers other than a few select Americans.” She “was rather disgusted by that,” knowing that xenophobia deterred some, while others “wanted to believe that they were the only writers in the world.” This was exactly “the kind of arrogance” she despised most. The cliques within the Workshop itself also seemed to raise insurmountable barriers dividing young scholars from fruitful exchanges. Not only was there a “reluctance to meet foreign writers”: an equally powerful pressure to “stick to your group” of narrow subcultures designated by genre delimited literary and creative expansion.17 After being awarded a Teaching/Writing Fellowship, Dove was offered office space in the English-Philosophy Building, but was told that she might find her office mate unacceptable. She shot back a look of disbelief to the inquiring secretary, Connie Brothers, asking, “Is there something wrong with him?” Brothers replied, “No, we just wanted to check” since he was in fiction and not poetry. Expecting a refusal or some sort of compromise, Brothers was stunned that she was open to meeting another student outside of her specialization. “Sure, that would be wonderful,” Dove said without hesitation. Reflecting years later on the entrenched segregation of Workshop students according to genre, she commented that “the notion of prose writing and poetry writing as separate entities has been artificially created, partly as a result of fitting writing into the academic curriculum where it is easiest to teach them separately.” In her own work after graduation, poetry and fiction indeed became “part of the same process” because “it’s all writing; there are just different ways of going about it.” Looking back on her days at Iowa, she frankly revealed, “one of the things I deplored when I was in graduate school was just how separate the two were kept; the fiction writers and the poetry writers didn’t even go to the same parties.”18
The social dynamic at Iowa for Dove, as for Harjo and Cisneros, embodied the intellectual climate. Harjo and Cisneros faced a different challenge, because, unlike Dove, they did not venture beyond the exclusive Workshop circles. Dove instead discovered in the IWP a vast and thriving network of scholars eager to exchange ideas and launch projects. She removed herself from the “high-powered” gatherings that consisted of “more political shuffling” than “students getting together and caring for one another.” She “simply withdrew from that” because she “just didn’t like it, and so the second year I don’t think very many people saw me.” She “said bye after class and went to my apartment” but more often to the IWP offices or to the Mayflower dormitory that housed the international writers. She knew “the first year might have slowed me down in terms of poetry,” but she was determined to cross campus and reach out to this community of scholars from across the globe to prevent it from occurring again during the second.19
Just as Dove’s original decision as a youth in Akron, Ohio, to study German was an act of rebellion against the institutional conformity of her junior high school that favored French, she reached out—against all social cues and cultural precedence—to the international students. “Always a maverick,” as she later described herself.20 Unlike her self-conscious Workshop classmates struggling to define themselves in the process of their professional development, the IWP’s authors “had paid their dues” and “had been working at it a long time.”21 These foreign writers appealed to Dove the same way Ralph Waldo Emerson had gravitated toward the “finished men” in his circle of protégés a century earlier in the creative writing enclave of Concord, Massachusetts. They had outgrown the strident and often histrionic self-expression of early development and now bore a firm confidence in their aesthetic and professional visions. Dove similarly relished the opportunity to escape the pressure-filled cliques dividing the hypercompetitive young writers of the Workshop for a group of accomplished professionals who had advanced beyond the angst of the self-conscious developmental phase. They were eager to take her into the fold, rather than compete with her.
By the end of the spring semester of 1976 at the Workshop, Dove’s extended time away from Germany had begun to take its toll on her fluency. Her mastery of the German language held special value, since it brought her both social autonomy and access to her own untapped aesthetic power through an undiscovered rich literary tradition. To sharpen her edge, she volunteered as a translator for what the IWP established later that year as the Translation Workshop. Transgressing into the IWP offices from the Workshop as none of her classmates had, Dove inquired about the availability of such work. “If there’s a German writer,” she offered, “I’d be willing to help translate” for the fall semester of 1976.22 Enter the bespectacled, bright-eyed Fred Viebahn, a wellspring of energy with a quick smile and flowing locks cascading over his shoulders, a creature like none she had encountered in the Workshop.
Viebahn breezed into Iowa City a literary prodigy, a wunderkind from Cologne with six book-length publications including a novella, volumes of poetry and short stories, two novels, and a play to his credit at the age of twenty-nine. His first book, Die Schwarzen Tauben—which prophetically translates as The Black Doves—was named the German Book of the Month in 1969. In 1973 he won the literary prize for young writers of the City of Cologne, and his first play, Blutschwestern, debuted on stage in 1976 at Torturmtheater Sommerhausen. Unlike Dove’s Workshop classmates, Viebahn was a seasoned and accomplished author. Soon after the wheels of his plane skidded onto the tarmac of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport marking his first day in the country, IWP fellow Peter Nazareth greeted him and drove him to Paul Engle’s house in Iowa City. Once there, he was introduced to a bright young Workshop student; “she was beautiful,” he recalled, immediately attracted to “her colorful fingernails and fluent German.”23 To his delight, she had introduced herself in his native language, this time playing the role of accommodating host rather than the culture-shocked Auslander she had been in Tübingen. The circumstances for their falling in love at that instant could not have been better orchestrated. Viebahn’s overwhelming sense of presentiment on his first day in America met with Dove’s joy in reawakening her slumbering verbal prowess in the German language.
The longhaired and leather-jacketed German intellectual seemed heaven sent in his woody 1970 station wagon and John Lennon glasses. A photograph of the striking couple—confident, carefree and on the brink of literary greatness—posing next to the vehicle captures them basking in the sun at the beginning of their lifelong emotional and intellectual journey together. Known for its agriculture and conventional midwestern homogeneity, the state of Iowa in the mid-1970s seems an improbable place for the meeting of this transnational interracial intellectual couple. Dove never would have expected it herself based on her first impression of Iowa. When she turned on the TV several days before her Workshop courses commenced in late August 1976, only to discover “the pig reports” and little else, she wondered, “What am I doing here?” Spending her twenty-third birthday inexorably alone in this barren farmland left her “completely depressed.” Two years later, however, she would learn that Iowa, particularly through programs such as the IWP, was a relative bastion of progressive racial politics compared with institutions such as Florida State University in Tallahassee. A job offer at FSU presented a tempting opportunity, but the couple demurred because they “felt uneasy taking an interracial relationship to upstate Florida.”24
Connie Brothers, the Workshop secretary in 1975, remembered the couple as a perfectly suited pair whose long-term future together seemed as if it had been aligned in the stars. “She married him” four years later, in 1979, Brothers said, noting that everyone familiar with them was not surprised. “Rita was and still is outgoing,” Brothers recalled, noting that she began her efflorescence when the stranger from Cologne entered the scene. That fall of 1976, Dove was awarded “a teaching/writing fellowship [that is the Workshop’s] very best category of financial aid.” She proved to be “fabulous” as an instructor that semester, “since she had such a wonderful personality” and sophisticated background in literature and culture. Brothers described how Viebahn and Dove frequently “met on the same floor of EPB [the English-Philosophy Building],” and at other gatherings arranged by Engle. She explained how “in those days, Paul Engle wanted students from the Workshop to get to know the people in the IWP, so he had a number of social events that allowed that to happen.”25 Whereas Engle had encouraged collaboration with the Workshop in order to build on the momentum established by the program, the Workshop director John Leggett had little incentive to reach out to the IWP. The IWP’s purpose and scope existed entirely outside required courses, faculty, and degree granting for which the Workshop was responsible.
Although Engle actively encouraged Viebahn and Dove’s collaboration, she “stopped translating his work” if for no better reason than she had fallen in love with him. Their intimacy heightened expectations for translation beyond what either of them could realistically reach. She could hardly conceal her anger, calling to his attention the flaws, “you know there’s this, you missed that.” Likewise, he would find fault in her translations of his German poems, because she “couldn’t get something into English.”26 Ironically, the work that united them precipitated the first major conflict of their relationship. Putting an end to translating each other’s work opened up new channels for collaboration. Indeed, Dove credits Viebahn for many of her daring crossovers into other genres and subjects, including her first novel, Through the Ivory Gate. In the acknowledgments, she writes, “My heartfelt gratitude goes to my husband, Fred Viebahn, who literally ‘made me do it.’ ”27
Viebahn’s translations of Dove’s poetry into German proved especially difficult because they were written according to the Imagist aesthetic inspired by the poetry of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Successfully translating these works was nearly impossible for him, given the surreal disconnected images of her verse, which eluded his own mastery of English. To Dove’s good fortune, Louise Glück, whose approach is heavily influenced by the Imagists, arrived at the Workshop for the fall semester of 1976 for a one-year appointment as visiting lecturer. Although her classroom teaching was not effective in Dove’s estimation, “Glück was extremely good one-on-one; she was uncanny.”28 Integral to the aesthetic of H.D.’s Hermetic Definition, which Glück introduced to Dove, is the exploration of unconscious urges of guilt, sex, and love.
The writings of H.D. were perhaps even more influential on Dove than the tutelage offered by Glück. Both the prose and poetry of H.D. had been nothing short of a revelation for her at the Workshop, as she was transfixed by its “strange and wonderful” powers that were “so very musical in its own insistent phrasing.” Indeed, the distilled intensity of H.D. meant that she could only “take her in very small doses,” a mind so brilliant she feared she would “start sounding like her.” She admired H.D.’s capacity “to take the outrageous circumstances of her life” and craft something “which was absolutely beautiful” and “not be self-indulgent” or “confessional in any sense.”29
Crossing the Color Line at Iowa
The Yellow House on the Corner, Dove’s first book, published in 1980, reflects what was then called the New Black Aesthetic, which signaled the end of the Black Arts Movement in several important ways. The poems in the volume resonate with the New Black Aesthetic’s defining features of “borrowing across race and class lines, a parodic relationship to the Black Arts Movement, a new and unflinching look at black culture, [and] a belief in finding the universal in oneself and one’s experiences.”30 Her early experimentation with the universal in her own experience, particularly her adolescence, appears in her Iowa MFA thesis in poems such as “Adolescence II.” Highly prestigious journals including Antaeus and the Paris Review featured this and other poems from her thesis. “Adolescence II” and “Nigger Song” earned space in two high-profile anthologies at the time, The American Poetry Anthology and Eating the Menu. Both poems simultaneously departed from the Black Arts Movement and challenged the expectations of her Workshop classmates.
Dove’s Workshop classmates expected her writing to represent the Black Arts Movement primarily because they knew so little about the emergent New Black Aesthetic. “I was the only Black person in the Iowa workshop at the time, and I think many Black writers who have been in workshops will have had the same experience: you’re always the only one. There falls the burden,” not only of white guilt, but of advancing an aesthetic palatable to a white audience. Indeed, the chief complaint against her work was that her treatment of subjects was too abrasive and vitriolic. Such a situation arose when her poem “Kentucky, 1833” was spotlighted for discussion. It depicts a Sunday on a plantation, which is the “day of roughhousing,” music, and boxing that draws “Massa and his gentlemen friends” who “come to bet on the boys.” These celebrations quelled and redirected any underlying rebellious impulses so that slaves returned on Monday to their labor with new vigor. Dove captures the essence of this insidious design in how the young slave “Jason is bucking and prancing about” like an aroused animal, feeling his oats, spurred by “Massa” who “said his name reminded him of some sailor, a hero who crossed an ocean, looking for a golden cotton field.” The prose-poem’s final image is of Jason, the boxing match “winner,” “sprawled out under a tree and the sun,” looking at the sky as if it “were an omen we could not understand, the book that, if we could read, would change our lives.”31 In these last phrases the perspective poignantly shifts to the collective pronoun, extending Jason’s experience to the slave population as a whole.
The moving “Kentucky, 1833” stands as one of few exceptions to how Dove’s Workshop training, “which although helpful, had a stultifying effect on her poetry,” according to Malin Pereira, author of Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism.32 Peer criticism of this ambitious piece tellingly reflected the Workshop culture’s inability to appreciate the poem’s powerful expression of the New Black Aesthetic. Complaints centered around one comment, “Well, I feel like someone told me that in order to be healthy, I had to take a spoonful of medicine a day, but I’d rather take an apple a day,” which established the class consensus, Dove recalled. The point drove home how “for some people the horror of events and the political aspect of a poem make it impossible for them to see any aesthetic merits.” This accounts for “one reason poetry with political or sociological content often gets short shrift” and why it is “very hard for people to be able to discuss that material in a technical sense.” The opposition gave her valuable insight into her own potential: “At the same time, that comment was the first indication I had that I was onto something good.” She thus resolved to pursue what they told her to avoid.33
The criticism of “Kentucky, 1833” found fault not in its edifying glimpse at the injustice of a particularly pernicious aspect of slavery—the ideological import of its faux “celebrations” and system of rewards—so much as its method of doing so. Indeed, calling for “an apple a day” rather than the bitter “spoonful of medicine” she was offering spoke of the white readership’s demand for black experience rooted in the triumphalist narrative of the Black Arts Movement.34 The New Black Aesthetic, as her poem demonstrates, takes a fearless look at black experience not to create an essentialist view of it, but to broaden it across racial and historical boundaries. Labor exploitation, literacy, and capitalism resonate beyond the historically specific subject while revealing a painful glimpse at a day in the life of a Sunday on the plantation.
The most pivotal year of Dove’s early career occurred in 1976, which marked the official end of the Black Arts Movement as well as her introduction to Viebahn and the IWP. Signs of the Black Arts Movement’s long decline surfaced as early as 1959, in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. A key scene in it depicts the young, idealistic Beneatha Younger’s indoctrination into Afrocentrism by her new boyfriend, who plays a recording of tribal music for her. Beneatha’s drunken brother Walter Younger unexpectedly stumbles in from the local bar, jumps on the coffee table, and launches into a mock oration as if he were a warrior chief. The scene calls attention to the Black Arts Movement’s ignorance of pressing contemporary urban problems in the African-American community such as alcoholism and unemployment. This was one of many critiques exposing how the movement unraveled in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to such criticism, “the black revolutionary journals also lost their constituency.” By the early 1970s the most significant of them, Black Dialogue (1964–1970), Liberator (1961–1973), and Journal of Black Poetry (1966–1973), all ceased publication. By the time Dove arrived at Iowa in 1975, they were all defunct, except for the Black Arts Movement’s flagship journal, Black World, which finally ceased in February 1976, during her second year. By the time of her graduation from the Workshop in 1977, the culture “experienced a marked impetus toward more consciously literary and theoretically based analyses of African-American texts.”35 That year the Modern Language Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities endorsed a new study aimed at liberating critical discourse from “fundamentally ideological or sociological methodologies that tended toward the naively reductive.”36 It was precisely that naively reductive critical discourse that frustrated Dove’s attempts to write poetry like “Kentucky, 1833” at the Workshop.
Dove refused the role of spokesperson of her race. “Given my middle-class background, there were many kinds of experiences that I had which could not only have been experienced by Blacks.” “Adolescence II,” for example, depicts a surreal scene of searching sexual awakening whose poignant vulnerability explodes the sanctioned racial valor of the Black Arts Movement. This and other poems about adolescence that appeared in The Yellow House on the Corner engaged “topics, which were for everyone.” Therefore she “submitted them to magazines with that in mind. The slave narratives came a bit later,” with the notable exceptions of “Kentucky, 1833,” and “The Transport of Slaves from Maryland to Mississippi,” both of which encountered resistance in workshop discussions.37 The latter is a stirring pastiche of historical prose and poetry describing a slave mutiny on a wagon train ironically sabotaged by “a slave woman” who “helped the Negro driver mount his horse and ride for help.”38 It offers an early glimpse of Dove’s powerful experimentation with nonfiction sources, which reached full fruition in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Thomas and Beulah (1986), her narrative verse rendering of her grandparents’ history. Such transgression across genres began for her in Stanley Plumly’s Forms of Poetry course, which she found “absolutely liberating: we read prose—not just fiction, but imaginative nonfiction memoire, travelogues.” The environment, unlike her other Workshop courses, appealed to her because of its crossover dynamic that resulted in “a class of poets discussing the strategies of prose.”39
Dove’s difficult decision not to send her manuscripts to “Black magazines” speaks to the depth of her disaffiliation from the Black Arts Movement. Pressure mounted at Iowa to adopt more palatable modes of expressing political subjects and to localize her subjects instead of crossing cultural boundaries. She actively “resisted being typecast,” which posed a particularly difficult challenge, since Toni Morrison and Alice Walker had not yet made it “possible for people to imagine that a black writer doesn’t have to write about ghettos.” The Workshop, rather than the more eclectic and culturally diverse IWP, had not shown signs of “a readiness for people to accept” individuality “on both sides, Black and white.” The program’s racial politics in 1978 still reflected the attitude of the 1960s, when authors of color were expected only to “write what they know” and mainly represent their race. The strident first wave of “necessary overkill” was essential for placing race on the literary and political agenda in the 1960s, because “in order to develop Black consciousness it was important to stress Blackness, to make sure the poems talked about being Black, because it had never really been talked about.”40
The Workshop’s habitual assessment of authors of “minority groups” according to “whether they adhere to a genre” presented a barrier to creativity for Dove. She looked to Zora Neale Hurston as a model for how an African-American woman writer could avoid this trap, in which “the genre is making them, instead of them making literature.” Dove knew that writers of color who define themselves as cosmopolitan could often be accused of “being too loud,” on one hand, or absurdly, “playing up to whites” on the other.41 This crossing of boundaries played a major role in her first book after the Workshop. The Yellow House on the Corner is deliberately “very domestic,” yet with the intention of reaching beyond parochial boundaries. The life she depicts there, like the house itself, “is on the corner,” she reminds us, “on the edge of domesticity,” poised to evoke “a sense of something beyond that—outside of that boundary, there is something else.”42 Whereas Cisneros embraced her role as representative of inner-city working-class Latino Americans, Dove refused to play a similar role on behalf of African Americans. Although Dove was “incredibly excited about some aspects of the Black Arts Movement” in the late 1960s, she increasingly saw it as an industry that compromised the complexity of the notion of “black art.” “The concept is not pure,” she argued, because “the insistence on black art is just a device, a way of establishing territory or generating publicity.”43
Dove knew she could not accurately speak for a ghettoized black American adolescence, given the middle-class privilege of her upbringing in Akron, Ohio. Her childhood home was filled with her father’s German books from his war years—he insisted on learning the language of the enemy—as well as scientific journals and texts that were tokens of his status as the first African-American chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.44 Surrounded by more material than she could read, she was stimulated by “all these different cultures that swirled around” her. “I experienced the world as a kind of feast, a banquet,” she recalled.45 She was named a Presidential Scholar, one of the nation’s top one hundred high-school seniors, and graduated summa cum laude in 1973 at Miami of Ohio. These were “rather sheltered college years at Miami University, in the rural setting of southwestern Ohio” where she “filled the role of the striving, gifted Black student.” In Germany, and later in Iowa, she “was on display” in these strange environments “where some people pointed fingers at me and others pitied me as a symbol of centuries of brutality and injustice against Blacks.” Whereas she felt alienated while living abroad, “both from my home country and from the place I was in,” she also recognized how “serious travel can heighten the awareness of a writer to see many sides of a story.”46 Occupying that liminal space in Germany had an illuminating effect on her powers of observation. At Iowa, her development came under threat from the retrograde racial politics of the Workshop, but the IWP provided an outlet for the development of her newly acquired skills in German language and literature.
Dove dared to cross more than just color lines at Iowa. Her core principle, “I just don’t believe in boundaries,” is embodied in her willingness to venture into unfamiliar cultural terrain.47 Occupying both African-American and international literary worlds, she “refuses and ironizes clichéd political discourse and aesthetic dilettantism,” as critic Terry Steffen points out.48 Her Imagistic personal lyric mode, for example, is on display in works such as “Adolescence II.” “Can you feel it yet?” ask the surreal “seal-men with eyes as round as dinner plates” to the speaker of the poem, who is on the verge of her sexual awakening. They wait for a reply but she does not know what to say. “They chuckle” and vanish, with a knowing “Well, maybe next time.”49 “Adolescence II” stands with “Nigger Song: An Odyssey” among her greatest Iowa achievements, the latter of which staunchly refuses conventional racial discourse.
The ironic political discourse of Dove’s poetry was inspired in part by contemporary East German authors. Since “overtly political opinions other than party line were not allowed,” they encoded their writings with political significance. No matter how abstract or highly subjective East German poetry may appear on the surface, “there is always something in between the lines talking about oppression,” Dove explains. But for many East Germans exiled to West Germany, that political edge embedded in richly metaphorical language became dull. Sara Kirsch epitomized how the “latest poems seem very lax” after the transition to the West. Dove suspected that indifferent audiences in Western capitalist culture “took the wind out of the sails” of such Eastern dissent writers.50
Dove’s engagement with the German language at Iowa through Viebahn and the IWP encouraged exploration into what was then considered forbidden territory for an African-American woman writer. “Agosta the Winged Man” and “Rasha the Black Dove” explicitly deal with German subjects, and thus risked stirring controversy, particularly among advocates of the Black Arts Movement. She imagined their objections: “Why are you writing about a white—German!—artist?” To avert such a hostile reception, she deliberately avoided exposure. “I didn’t think I was strong enough to withstand the political fallout,” she confessed. Thus she opted to “keep out of the political fray” by withholding such volatile material from publication. She “waited” and “stepped out as a writer later, when things became more tolerant.”51
Dove’s thesis supervisor, Louise Glück, played a strong role in encouraging her work with German subjects, as in “The Bird Frau.”52 As a New Yorker born of Hungarian immigrants, Glück lent a vital internationalist perspective to Dove. In her thirties, with only a single volume of poetry to her credit, Firstborn (1968), Glück advised Dove at Iowa from 1975 to 1977. Unlike other faculty members who attracted graduate student advisees through their literary awards and star-studded publication records, Glück appealed to Dove amid the narrowly Americanist Workshop faculty. It was not until decades later that Glück’s star rose when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night in 2014. Glück, like Viebahn, provided a vital bridge to foreign subjects. Her influence testifies to how Dove believed “one of the greatest tragedies of the Black Arts Movement was its insistence upon Afrocentric arts to the exclusion of others.” Such an exclusive purview was tantamount to insisting that “all the world’s resources were traitorous somehow,” she contended.53
The expectation that African-American writers must be limited to functioning as “the medium for proposing activist solutions to racial problems or for explicit black proselytizing” struck Dove as profoundly incongruous to her creative development.54 She also denied other doctrinaire uses of literature, particularly the Workshop’s nationalistic rhetoric handed down from the Cold War. At Iowa, the IWP occupied a liminal space in the bureaucratic infrastructure of the university. Its balanced representation of authors from Chile, Ceylon, Taiwan, and Romania formed a kind of literary United Nations. Since IWP writers did not come to Iowa to pursue a degree, and since Iowa did not subsidize them through grants, the IWP’s funding structure demanded almost twice as much capital as the Workshop. But with Engle’s massive industrial and federal network financially backing Iowa’s literary mission, the IWP flourished. The bulk of the capital necessary to run the IWP came from a rich wellspring outside of Iowa, just as it had for the Workshop. Indeed, of the $200,000 Engle raised for the Workshop in 1966, less that $10,000 in revenue was drawn from Iowa sources.55
Thus with little local funding to support the international travel and monthly stipend for scholars like Viebahn, Engle had to look to other sources. These invariably included U.S. embassies and cultural affairs bureaus, which began to send “the best talent from their assigned countries.” Viebahn ranked at the top of Germany’s list, and thus received federal support for his visit, funded in part by the U.S. Information Agency. Engle’s explicit aim was to win favor abroad for the U.S. capitalist system and its attendant political democracy, a Cold War objective embedded in the Workshop and its aesthetics that Workshop alumnus Eric Bennett and critic Mark McGurl have discussed.56 Engle boasted, “the first books that show America in a positive light in Hungarian, Rumanian, and Polish were written by writers in our program.” In addition to providing a stimulating outlet for seasoned worldly young authors like Dove, Engle’s concern was ideological. This is evidenced by how he touted Xiao Qian in 1979 as “the first prose writer from the People’s Republic of China to visit America since 1949.” After his IWP visit, Engle reported with pride that Qian’s piece in the People’s Daily “was the first article praising our competitive system ever to appear” in that journal, “which is read by 500 million people.” To avoid the appearance of producing apologists on behalf of free market capitalism, Engle pointed out that the Chinese novelist Ding Ling, who served two prison terms in her country for her political activism, came to the IWP to spread the message of human rights in the free world.57 Indeed, as Bennett points out, “Engle’s vision for institutionalized creative writing was both shaped and motivated by the Cold War” in an attempt to use “culture (and government help) to fight communism.”58 Bennett dates the Cold War at Iowa from 1945 to 1965, but evidence suggests the vestiges of its rhetoric persisted well into the 1970s in certain instances.
Despite the persistence of Cold War rhetoric into the 1970s in Iowa’s writing programs, the Vietnam War and developments abroad complicated the ideological climate and infused it with activism, protest, and defiance of authority. Viebahn was no apologist for the free market; Dove, as mentioned earlier, believed better poetry came from East German writers, and that the capitalist system of West Germany actually functioned as a deterrent to powerful literature. West Germans were bombarded by consumer culture and thus looked upon poetry and the arts indifferently, or as an irrelevant pastime incapable of competing with commercial media.
Dove’s resistance to being recruited as a soldier for ideological warfare resonates through an early poem she began at Iowa titled “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream.” Using her signature surreal Imagism, she situates herself in the audience of a Black Arts Movement rally. As the intensity from the podium escalates, the speaker’s hair begins falling out, “suggesting the decay of the ideology that Don Lee embodies.”59 Dove’s dissent toward doctrinaire aesthetics not only criticizes his “exclusive celebration of blackness,” it “is a comic feminist putdown of masculine posturing” prone to the sort of “homophobic and racist polemics that Lee preached,” as the critic Pat Righelato aptly explains.60 Dove said of her motivation to dismantle Lee, “I was kind of terrified of being suffocated before I began” a career as a professional author, and thus penned her own poetic declaration of independence.61
Defying Alice Walker
The young woman with the flashy fingernails whom Marvin Bell approached at the Bread Loaf conference for writers may have played the naive and eager young apprentice to his tweedy wizened author figure at the beginning of the 1970s. But by the middle of the decade, she had become a force to be reckoned with in the world of American letters, as no less a figure than Alice Walker would soon discover. While Dove was still enrolled at Iowa in 1975, editor Daniel Halpern selected “Adolescence II” along with “Nigger Song: An Odyssey” and “This Life” for The American Poetry Anthology. As an occasion for celebration heralding an auspicious professional debut for the twenty-three-year-old author, the volume’s publication brought the unanticipated result of inciting outrage from one of the most prominent figures in African-American literature. When Dove’s phone rang, she never expected Walker, the author of the famous short story “Everyday Use,” to be on the line. At the time, Walker’s career was on a steady ascent, building momentum toward its zenith. In less than a decade, she would receive both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple, achieving both worldwide fame and a permanent place in the canon of twentieth-century American literature. Walker, who had served on the editorial board for the newly published volume, informed Dove in no uncertain terms that she “refused to read at the book launch in San Francisco because a ‘racist poem’ had been published in the anthology.” To Dove’s horror, Walker went on to identify the poem in question as Dove’s very own Iowa product, “Nigger Song: An Odyssey.” Incredulous, Dove pleaded for an explanation, whereupon she learned that “Alice objected to the use of the word ‘nigger,’ even by a black writer.”62
With her heart in her throat, Dove hung up the phone, wheeled around and marched toward her typewriter in the cramped apartment on 24 Van Buren Street in Iowa City. Gathering her poise, she typed out “a letter explaining my philosophy about the word.” She defended her intent “to redeem the word, to reimagine it as a black concept,” a deft political move anticipating LGBTQ activists’ later reclamation of the term “queer” from derisive usage. Days later, a letter appeared with a return address reading “Alice Walker.” Her fingers trembling, Dove tore open the letter. Although the tone was stately, it was insistent in its refusal to compromise. The “polite, dignified letter” recognized Dove’s “right to use whatever words I choose but argued that we should not use such words in the company of white people.” Reaching this part of the letter, Dove raised her eyes and quietly made a vow to herself: “No one’s going to put me in that kind of cage—not whites, not blacks, not even myself.” Her dedication to total creative autonomy at that moment was complete. She vowed to write without limitation, to use any language, cross any cultural boundaries, and invoke any subject on her creative journeys. As for the poem Walker denounced for its use of one of the world’s most offensive and politically charged words, she knew her art would rule the day and “defy whatever nefarious purposes people may want to use it for.”63
Such aesthetic freedom echoed the lifestyle Dove led after she graduated from Iowa in 1977. Two years of intensive poetry training at the Workshop took its toll. She grew weary of the “Workshop poems” she had become so adept at writing. She became impatient and disenchanted with the cadences and sounds of her own poetic voice. The bureaucratic university system—with its rules and competition for Teaching/Writing Fellowships—also contributed to her fatigue. It is not surprising, therefore, that Dove embraced fiction to refresh her creative spirit. She also rejected an opportunity to return to academic life by turning down the most significant job opportunity of her career. The choice between the tenure-track assistant professor position at Florida State University and the prospect of joining Viebahn at Oberlin College in her birth state of Ohio was difficult. While in Ohio, he taught classes in German literature and directed plays; she enrolled in art classes and launched a collection of short stories that later appeared as Fifth Sunday. After two years at Oberlin, they spent two more years abroad in Israel and Berlin, a time she refers to as their “salad days.” The untethered, bohemian freelance life brought them the autonomy and freedom they desired. Her second book, Museum, came to fruition at this stage. After two years overseas she grew concerned that she had lost her poetic edge in English, “the precise tone of a phrase.” Prose offered a more forgiving genre where “the damage was more manageable” than poetry. In 1981, she returned to poetry and the academy, this time as a faculty member in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.64 Although she has moved appointments throughout the remainder of her career, she has maintained academic employment ever since.
On Iowa Avenue just east of the Pentacrest, Dove’s words appear beneath pedestrians’ feet in a commemorative plaque: “Sometimes/ a word is found so right it trembles/ at the slightest explanation.” The quote is one of a series of immortal lines from famous Workshop faculty and graduates that include Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut, embossed on the walkway along the avenue leading toward the majestic golden-domed Old Capitol building. What makes it stand out from these luminaries is precisely what distinguished her formative years at the Workshop—literary art’s liberation from explanation by critics and ideologues intent on binding it to social duty, which, for Dove, defies neat categorization. Like a perfectly chosen word in a poem, Dove’s career at Iowa was as unique as it was irreplaceable. Perhaps most telling of her legacy is the line that follows: “You start out with one thing,” as in her first year at the Workshop before meeting Viebahn and discovering the IWP, “end/ up with another, and nothing’s/ like it used to be, not even the future.”65 She propelled herself toward that future, inspired by the East German poets who delicately, but aggressively, challenged authority and crossed boundaries in their writing: their tacit credo was to expand imaginative horizons beyond the limits of “the larger community censorship of the individual imagination.”66