Rooms of Their Own

By JACK E. WHITE/CHARLOTTESVILLE

Two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson expressed the view that blacks were innately incapable of writing poetry because "their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination." He dismissed the work of Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American female poet, as "below the dignity of criticism." There is no evidence that the sage of Monticello had actually read Wheatley's poems before issuing his put-down. In fact, he misspelled her name.

How fitting, then, that America's new poet laureate is Rita Dove, a black woman who calls herself a spiritual heir of Wheatley's, and whose verses appeal not only to the senses but also to the imagination and the intellect. Moreover, Dove does her work on Jefferson's own turf. She lives with her husband, German novelist Fred Viebahn, and their 10-year-old daughter Aviva on a wooded hillside near Charlottesville, Virginia, a 15-minute drive from Monticello. She teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded. And last week she made her public debut as poet laureate by reading from her passionately lyrical stanzas in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, whose vast collection was replenished by 6,000 volumes purchased from Jefferson's library after the British burned the U.S. Capitol during the War of 1812.

So what would Jefferson think of making Dove the nation's official voice of poetry? "I think he would be dismayed and say it was a political move, an affirmative-action thing," says Dove. "But then I don't really think of him as any great judge of poetry. He was dead wrong about Phillis. She had to deal with one of the dilemmas of the black artist that still exist today, that no matter what you do there's still this feeling that it's not good enough."

Not so with Dove, whose qualifications are beyond dispute, even though she satisfies all the demands of political correctness. At 40 Dove is the youngest person, second woman (after Mona Van Duyn) and first African-American to be chosen as poet laureate since the position was created eight years ago. "She was the absolutely perfect choice," says Gwendolyn Brooks, the only other black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. "She can be brightly irreverent, carefully humorous and mercilessly inclusive. She has it in her to become a great poet."

Unlike her British counterpart, who is expected to crank out disposable verses on such occasions as the birth of a member of the royal family, Dove is only required to deliver one public reading of her own work and organize appearances by other writers. Beyond that, her task is to promote poetry in whatever way she chooses.

Dove will bring enormous energy and flamboyance to the assignment. She is an artist bursting with the need to express herself right down to her fingernails, each painted in a different, dazzlingly bright color. "This way I never have to worry about matching my nails to what I'm wearing," she says, then adds a deeper explanation: "I like the idea that it makes people startle a little bit and think that maybe not everything is just what meets the eye. I think people should be shaken up a bit when they walk through life. They should stop for a moment and really look at ordinary things and catch their breath."

The comment applies equally well to Dove's poetry. What impresses critics most about her work is the effortless economy and exactness of the language she employs to distill the essence of life's small happenings, etching gemlike verbal images that detonate a gentle shock of recognition. "I just believe that everyday moments are immensely valuable to us and that recorded history does not acknowledge them sufficiently," says Dove. "That's why I'm drawn to making readers stop for a moment and pay attention to something that seems very ordinary. When we can learn to appreciate moments like that, we can feel freed inside."

For example, a child's small triumph with geometry homework:

I prove a theorem and the house expands:

the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,

the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

The frenzied preparations for a younger sister's wedding:

My mother works up a sudsbath

of worries: what if

the corsages are too small,

if the candles

accidentally ignite

the reverend's sleeve?

Dove's poems often transcend racial boundaries, celebrating, almost like a highbrow Erma Bombeck, the domestic ties all families share. "There are times when I am a black woman who happens to be a poet, and times when I am a poet who happens to be black," says Dove. "There are also times when I am more conscious of being a mother or a member of my generation. It's so hopelessly confused that I don't make a big deal out of it."

Yet Dove's works are most affecting when they focus on how small lives play out against the background of sweeping historical events from the black experience. That approach is best exemplified by Thomas and Beulah, a 44-poem collection evoking the lives of her maternal grandparents. One of Dove's four books of verse (she has also written a novel and a collection of short stories), it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. She took poetic liberties, changing her grandmother's name from Georgianna because Beulah scanned better. But, she says, her ancestors, who moved from the South to the smokestack city of Akron, Ohio, in the vast black migration of the early 20th century, would recognize themselves.

The saga was inspired, says Dove, "by a very small, unassuming moment." Assigned as a 14-year-old to keep her grandmother company after her grandfather died, Dove heard the stories of how they fell in love, made their living and raised their children. Each incident later became a poem: Thomas' youthful wandering along the Mississippi River; her grandparents' purchase of a "sky blue Chandler" car for a trip to Tennessee; Thomas' witnessing of the disastrous crash of a huge airship constructed at an Akron rubber factory. In Dove's loving reconstruction, Thomas emerges as a dandy:

King of the Crawfish

in his yellow scarf,

mandolin pressed tight

to his hounds-tooth vest

He is eventually domesticated by her grandmother, a serious-minded woman who could nonetheless be stirred into a reverie about an old beau by polishing the furniture:

Under her hands scrolls

and crests gleam

darker still. What

was his name, that

silly boy at the fair with

the rifle booth?

In the end, the reader feels a deep intimacy with these people and their history. A similar sense of connection is what Dove hopes to bring to her new post. She believes she can make poetry seem less airy and irrelevant. "I think one of the things you have to do is show that poets are real people who write about real things," she says. "I'm hoping that by the end of my term people will think of a poet laureate as someone who's out there with her sleeves rolled up and working, not sitting in an ivory tower looking out at the Potomac."

Dove wants to re-create for the young her own awestruck discovery of poetry's power, which began when she took down an anthology of American verse from the bookshelf in her family's home in Akron. After that, her otherwise strict parents made no attempt to censor what she read, and she read everything from Gone With the Wind to Sylvia Plath. "I remember reading ((Plath's)) poem Daddy, which ends, 'Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through,' " says Dove. "I realized that you don't have to be polite in poetry, and I couldn't get enough of it after that."

At first Dove's love affair with poems unfolded with little encouragement -- or interference -- from her teachers. That convinced her that poetry should be experienced, not talked -- or taught -- to death. "One of the major reasons why poetry has gotten a bad rap is that at school we had to read a poem and then answer questions about it," says Dove. "But I think that when a poem moves you, it moves you in a way that leaves you speechless. Poems, if they're really wonderful poems, have used the best possible words and in the best possible order, and anything you say about them seems like a desecration. I think I grew up without that feeling of oppression because when I began to read poems, no one told me anything. I was just reading these things and deciding for myself."

Dove hopes to restore that sense of personal discovery through high tech. She wants to use closed-circuit TV to broadcast readings into elementary and junior high schools, then answer questions from the students. "I think we can get these kids when they're young," she says. "I think they would be sufficiently intrigued by the closed-circuit aspect of it. It also gets them out of regular classes. I'll take it from there."

Not that Dove is aiming for the lowest common denominator. She believes poems can be too easy, too accessible to have lasting value. "There should be something to intrigue you, to hold you enough so that you're willing to live with it and work it out on your own," she says. "A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it." With Dove as poet laureate, Americans will get plenty of poetic sustenance.