![]() As an undergraduate, she recalls, she realized that she was arranging her college course work around taking writing courses.ĭove's first two books of poetry were The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) and Museum (1983). Dove has said in interviews that, while she was always reading and writing as a child and as a teenager, she knew no professional writers and had not realized that it was possible to have a writing career. She taught creative writing at Arizona State University until 1989, and now teaches at the University of Virginia. Dove has been writer-in-residence at Tuskegee Institute. In 1977 she received an MFA from the University of Iowa. Rita Dove was a star student at Miami University, Ohio, and upon graduating in 1973 won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Tübingen, in Germany. His work in chemistry produced only employment as an elevator operator at Goodyear, until the protests of one of his professors led to his becoming the first black chemist in the industry. Her father was the only one of ten children to finish high school and attend college, and like his own father he worked for the Goodyear Tire Company. In writing such poetry, for Dove, the truth of memory -how something is recalled or imagined - can be as valid or more so than the truth of mere fact.ĭove was born in Akron, Ohio, a city dominated by its tire industry. The connection is that the poems seek to understand history through the lives of individuals, seeing the points of view, dreams, and injustices that make up individual lives and the culture that surrounds them, in a poetry that is finally about tolerance and patience, the importance of language, understanding, and the responsibility of the poet to help stress that importance and foster that understanding. ![]() Most of all, it's about waiting for the day you can finally fly free - a part of adolescence that, car or no car, everyone can relate to.Rita Dove's poetry encompasses historical events, mythic contexts, and deeply personal poems about her immediate and past family history. It's a poem for young people who are dying to get away to a place where they can be themselves - and aching for the driver's license they need to get there. "The car in motion," Dunn writes, "music filling it, and sometimes one other person/who understood the bright altar of the dashboard/and how far away/a car could take him." ![]() Everyone is quiet until one student speaks up and says it's his car. In Stephen Dunn's The Sacred, a teacher asks a class for the place they escape to. "But at the time it can be very humiliating and heart-wrenching being with your mother and the bra lady."Īnd then, of course, there is the adolescent desire to escape - escape your homework, escape your parents and escape your own body. "When we first heard it, I thought, 'Wow, good for Parneshia that she can turn this subject into something that we can laugh about now,' " Paschen says. "The bra lady and my mother discuss how the bras fit just right and will do the trick with no bouncing at all/ Mama thanks the lady for torturing me and we leave the nightmare that is the bra department." In Parneshia Jones' Bra Shopping, a girl and her mother go in search of the girl's first bra: ![]() "She actually wants to be writing her poem."Īnother theme the collection explores is the pain of puberty. "She's obviously a whiz kid, but at the same time, she's in math class daydreaming," Paschen says of Dove's narrator. "We wanted to really give the broadest spectrum of subjects."Īlso in the mix are poems about the pressures of school, including Carl Sandburg's Arithmetic ("If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she/gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is/better in arithmetic, you or your mother?") and Rita Dove's Flash Cards, in which a 10-year-old girl can't help but think of flowers while her father quizzes her on her math homework. "There are poems about when you feel like you hate your mother, poems about loving your mother, poems about when you lose a grandparent, poems about sibling rivalry," Paschen tells NPR's Renee Montagne. , a new book and CD compilation of poems that speak to life as a tween. Paschen is the editor of Poetry Speaks Who I Am: Poems of Discovery, Inspiration, Independence and Everything Else. Today, poet Elise Paschen is turning her attention to yet another most universal of human experiences: awkward adolescence. In the 14th century, Petrarch wrote about love in the 17th century, John Donne wrote about God.
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