Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a poet in the town where she comes from people glow with pride when they hear her name mentioned.

She's the first African American to become the poet laureate of the United States.

She's a Pulitzer Prize winner and the Clintons are... become the poet laureate of the United States.

She's a Pulitzer Prize winner,

and the Clintons are among those who've listened

with pleasure to her work.

She comes from a family which, to use her phrase,

had struggled to achieve middle-class status, and she seemed destined to become a lawyer or a doctor.

Instead she writes about her family and her roots in a style that's both polished and musical.

You can't be a writer unless you get involved, she says.

How can you render the world unless you're involved with it?

Currently, the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia,

she is Rita Dove.

So you don't seal yourself off from the world to write then Rita,

or do you just specifically to do the business of writing?

For the business of writing? For the business of writing, I will seal myself off momentarily,

but I can't imagine cutting myself off from the world

and writing about it at the same time.

But on the other hand, you write a lot about your memories

of your childhood, it seems to me, of your relatives talking to you, telling you stories.

...