Rita Dove's "Ars Poetica"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s poem is by Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952), an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000.[1] Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia[2] from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.[3]
—Bio via Wikipedia
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm David Kern, and today is Friday, September 1st, 2023. |
| 0:10.0 | Today's poem is by an American poet named Rita Dove. |
| 0:16.0 | She was born August 28th, 1952, which means that her birthday was just a couple days ago. |
| 0:21.3 | So I wanted to share one of my favorite of her poems with you. |
| 0:25.1 | Before I do that, I want to thank Sean Johnson for holding down the fort here in the show during |
| 0:30.3 | August. I was a little MIA, very busy with a number of things. |
| 0:35.1 | And he was able to bring you episodes, not every day, but more days than he |
| 0:40.9 | is contractually obligated to, so to speak. So I wanted to say thank you to him. Thank you to everyone |
| 0:47.1 | who's been listening and enjoying his work here on the daily poem, the poems that he has been sharing. |
| 0:52.6 | But that brings us to today's poem by |
| 0:54.8 | Rita Dove. It's called Arce Poetica, and I will read it once, then offer a few thoughts, |
| 1:01.7 | then read it again. From 1993 to 1995, Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate Consultant |
| 1:08.3 | and Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African-American to have been appointed to this position since it was created. |
| 1:16.3 | She also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a National Humanities Medal in 1996, National Medal of the Arts in 2011, a Wallace Stevens Award in 2019, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in |
| 1:28.8 | 2022, and the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry in 2022. So needless to say, she's one of the |
| 1:35.9 | most decorated and well-regarded American poets of the last quarter century. And again, |
| 1:41.8 | this is her poem, Ars Poet poetica this is how it goes |
| 1:45.5 | thirty miles to the only decent restaurant was nothing |
| 1:53.3 | a blink in the long dull stare of Wyoming |
| 1:57.0 | halfway there the unknown but terribly important s asA-S-D-Led, |
| 2:03.3 | stop! I want to be in this! And walked 15 yards onto the land before Sky bore down, |
... |
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