Not Fair, Not Shy, Not at Life’s End, a Poet Laureate Breaks the Mold

WASHINGTON — In a surprise move intended to revitalize the job of U.S. poet laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington selected University of Virginia professor Rita Dove for the position Tuesday. By picking the 40-year-old Dove as the successor to Mona Van Duyn, 72, Billington is making clear that the post no longer merely caps a career.

“This will ruin my life, but it’s an incredible honor and I’d be crazy not to accept it,” Dove said Tuesday from her home in Charlottesville, Va. She was already full of ambition and plans--two of the things the library administrators are hoping for.

“There’s an awareness we’ve not been successful in reaching a large segment of a potential audience for poetry,” acknowledged Prosser Gifford, the library’s director of scholarly programs and its poetry czar. “Some of the themes which Rita Dove treats, as well as her own personality, may indeed help in this respect.”

Translation: She’s not only a good poet, but energetic, female and black, and thus a good candidate to do more than draw the usual 200 hardy souls to the Library of Congress readings.

While Dove said that being the first black laureate didn’t make much difference to her personally, “it is significant in terms of the message it sends about the diversity of our culture and our literature, which is just vibrant now. That’s something which should be a cause for rejoicing, rather than fear or anguish.”

The post of laureate has its origins in that of poetry consultant, which began in 1937. In 1986, the position was upgraded, assuming the grand title of laureate. By design, duties are rather vague--in order, the library says, “to afford each incumbent maximum freedom.”

David Lehman, editor of “The Best American Poetry” annual anthology, said the selection of Dove “is a pretty daring choice. Everyone expected the laureate to be someone in his or her fifties, at a minimum.”

Dove, who was born in Akron, Ohio, and is married to the German novelist Fred Viebahn, has written four books of poems. The third, “Thomas and Beulah,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. She’s also done a book of stories, “Fifth Sunday,” as well as a novel, “Through the Ivory Gate,” which appeared last year to good reviews. She is at work now on a play. But verse is her first and truest love.

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful,” she said Tuesday. “It’s like a bouillon cube: You carry it around and then it nourishes you when you need it.”

Her work ranges from the pastoral to the intimate, touching humorously on modern times and probing racial issues. From “Genetic Expedition”:

“ . . . My child has

her father’s hips, his hair

like the miller’s daughter, combed gold.

Though her lips are mine, housewives

stare when we cross the parking lot

because of that ghostly profusion.”

Dove, who will receive a $35,000 stipend, said she will commute to Washington each week.