An introduction to Rita Dove by Grace Cavalieri
In a stunning video, Grace covers the life and work of the first female of color US Poet Laureate
"If critics look at a literary model of a balanced life, the thinking, feeling, sensual, and intuitive, this can be seen as a template for Rita Dove’s writing."
Grace Cavalieri's new web series "20th-Century Poets Commentaries" is off to a strong start with introductions and commentaries on such poets as Robert Hayden, Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, and Josephine Jacobsen.
Rita Dove, the first female of color to hold the vaunted position of US poet laureate, claims an important place in late 20th-century poetry and American history.
Her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Thomas and Beulah, Grace explains, displays her use of intuition in creating semi-biographical poems that reach, in Dove's words, to the "inner-truth."
You can support Grace's mission to create a video on every US Poet Laureate (and then some) by buying her book Other Voices, Other Lives.
All of her commentaries are produced by Forest Woods Media (a 501c3).
Featured Audio: “Letter from Sligo Creek” a poem by Rose Solari
Like the cover photo, the poems in Difficult Weather are timeless and—unlike the poems in many first books—extraordinarily mature. Although the narrative voice is generally that of a young woman in her late twenties and early thirties whose subject matter sometimes ranges back to early childhood, these are poems of adulthood: the discovery and endlessly painful rediscovery of human frailty, sexual and emotional betrayal, bad love in all its familial and romantic varieties, memory, and elegy…
Listen to Grace Cavalieri Interview fmr. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Grace Cavalieri is known widely for her stirring and empathic poetry, collected in her Legacy work Other Voices, Other Lives, but did you know that she is also an impressive interviewer? On her NPR show, The Poet and The Poem, she interviews significant poets from the US and around the world, with an aim of interpreting their lives through their poetry. In her tenure on the program, she has interviewed 9 US Poets Laureate (you can find a list with these archived interviews HERE), including the incomparable Robert Pinsky.
Featured Poetry: “Toytown” by Grace Cavalieri
The name Other Voices, Other Lives, is not purely poetical, in fact, for Grace Cavalieri it is a mission statement. In her Legacy Book of the same name there are several sections in 3rd person omnipotent which aim to breathe the same air as famous women who have suffered adversity. Tragic figure Anna Nicole Smith, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Cora from William Carlos William’s Kora in Hell. All in all they are an admix of Grace Cavalieri’s poetic life, all brought together in one beautiful volume; so, perhaps, we might figure that Anna Nicole Smith converses with Mary Wollstonecraft for the very first time in the pages of Other Voices, Other Lives.
Today, from the Anna section we have the heart-rending “Toytown”