February 1 & February 8, 2018: Poetry Alive!

Poetry Alive! Celebrates Rita Dove

By Maia Williams

To commemorate the second anniversary of San Miguel’s popular reading series, Poetry Café Bellas Artes, two special events are planned in anticipation of the February 15^th keynote presentation by the extraordinary poet and writer Rita Dove at the 2018 San Miguel Writers’ Conference.

Rita Dove Video Montage & Documentary, Thursday, Feb 1:

Two Poetry Café board members, Lee Harris and Sallie Kravetz, have collaborated to produce a 10-minute video montage that highlights her multi-faceted literary life and much, much more. The second film that will be shown is a charming 48-minute documentary by filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley. It explores Ms. Dove’s life, influences, and formative experiences through on-camera interviews, still images, and home movie clips.

Reading Rita Dove, Thursday, Feb 8:

To illustrate the impressive depth of her work, several local poets will read a sampling of their favorites poems by Ms. Dove, in English and Spanish.

…Dove’s work is known for its lyricism and beauty as well as its sense of history and political scope. She frequently writes about other art forms, including music in Sonata Mulattica and dance in the collection American Smooth (2004). Writing in the New York Times, Emily Nussbaum noted how dance and poetry connect for Dove: “For Dove, dance is an implicit parallel to poetry. Each is an expression of grace performed within limits; each an art weighted by history but malleable enough to form something utterly new.”
— PoetryFoundation.org

Ms. Dove is one of the world’s most accomplished and decorated literary icons. She served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate and was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (at age 33). More recently, she received the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and President Barack Obama presented her with the National Medal of Arts, which made her the only poet with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts to her credit. She has published nine collections of poetry including Thomas and Beulah, Mother Love, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, American Smooth, and Sonata Mulattica.

Her talents and interests are not limited to poetry. She has also published a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday, the novel Through the Ivory Gate, essays under the title The Poet’s World, and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and in many other venues. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For “America’s Millennium,” the White House’s 1999/2000 New Year’s celebration, Ms. Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams’s music — a poem to Steven Spielberg’s documentary The Unfinished Journey. Her latest book, Collected Poems 1974-2004, was released by W.W. Norton & Co. in May 2016; it was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the NAACP Image Award in Poetry.

Ms. Dove was born in Akron, Ohio. She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio in 1973 and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1977. In 1974/75 she held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany.

A member of PEN America, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ms. Dove holds the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn.

Rita Dove’s keynote address will be on Thursday, Feb 15, 6:30 PM in the ballroom at Hotel Real de Minas. To purchase tickets, visit: sanmiguelwritersconference.org.

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Founded in January of 2016, Poetry Café Bellas Artes meets monthly, September through April. The all-volunteer community organization features local and visiting poets (established and emerging) sharing original work in a casual setting.

Please arrive a few minutes early. Seating is first come, first seated.