Renowned poet Rita Dove read to a packed audience in the Goodhart Hall Music Room on April 13 for the final event of the semester in the Bryn Mawr Reading Series. Every seat was filled, with additional attendees standing in the back.
Founded in 1985, the Reading Series brings established writers to campus for free public readings of their work. In her introduction for Dove’s reading, Provost and Professor Dee Matthews described the series as “a space for discovery, for dialogue, for the kind of tension that transforms how we read and how we live.”
“Tonight, in the spirit of that legacy, we gather to hear a writer whose very presence in American letters has changed the shape of what we do, and can do,” Matthews said.
Born in Akron, Ohio in 1952, Dove served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. Her extensive body of work spans poetry, fiction and essays, and her honors include the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her third collection, “Thomas and Beulah,” and the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Charlottesville, Va., where she teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.
“Accolades alone cannot capture what happens when you encounter a Rita Dove poem,” Matthews said. “Her lines move with a music that is both familiar and strange, drawing us into worlds where history and intimacy, pain and beauty, are inseparable.”
“Dove’s poems do not simply invite us to witness; they demand that we do the difficult human work: feel it,” Matthews added.
Taking the podium, Dove began by acknowledging the audience: “It does the heart, the soul good to see all of you here, and to be in this room,” she said.
Dove primarily read from her 2021 collection “Playlist for the Apocalypse.” She opened with “Bellringer,” a poem about Henry Martin, a man born into slavery on the same day Thomas Jefferson died, who rang the bell at the University of Virginia for more than 50 years.
“When I first came [to Charlottesville], many, many years ago, everyone expected me to write ‘the poem about Charlottesville,’ which meant, of course, that I could not do it,” Dove said. “It did take, I estimate, about 15 years before this poem finally happened, and it happened because the bells were ringing one day.”
In “Ode to My Right Knee” from the same collection, Dove challenged herself to write a poem in which each line had to be alliterative in and of itself: “Haranguer, hag, hanger-on—how / much more maddening / insidious imperfection?”
“I couldn’t begin writing the poem until I had worked out, oh, what happens if you try to write lines that alliterate one after another?” Dove said. “There’s a jerkiness to it that happens, because there’s only so many prepositions in the world.”
Many of the poems Dove read were written from perspectives other than her own. One example, “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove” from her 2004 collection “American Smooth,” adopts the voice of Hattie McDaniel, the first African American person to win an Academy Award: “It’s a long, beautiful walk / into that flower-smothered standing ovation, / so go on / and make them wait.”
Dove also discussed her collaboration with composer Richard Danielpour on a 14-song performance piece spanning 50 years of American history. “One of the challenges, I think, of collaborating with the composer is that you do have to meet each other halfway,” she said. “You also think about what can be sung as opposed to what can be spoken.” She read selections from the resulting piece, “A Standing Witness,” including the prologue poem “Beside the Golden Door”: “When I / look up, surely there will be a cloud or a lone star / dangling.”
She concluded the reading with “Just Kidding,” an unpublished poem that begins, “A priest, a rabbi, and a poet walk into a bar.”
“I was asked to do a reading with a group of poets, where the idea was that we were supposed to read funny poems … as usual, with poetry, it starts out funny,” she joked.
Dove received a standing ovation at the end of the reading, followed by a 20-minute Q-and-A session with the audience.
One student asked her about the experience of being discussed with “historical reverence” while still living.
“It is something that I struggle with,” Dove said. “I’m never going to get an honest critique again, you know?”
She added that she stopped sending out her work for several years. “I take a long time now, between writing something and publishing it. I want to be true to the art,” she said. “You say a lot more when no one’s listening.”
Another student asked about her research process. “I do a lot of research into the things that I do, especially with the historical poems,” Dove said. “I feel like I owe it to those who cannot speak, and those who I am presuming to speak for, to get as much into their lives as possible.”
She illustrated this with an anecdote about writing her poem “Parsley,” which opens, “There is a parrot imitating spring / in the palace, its feathers parsley green.”
“I had to find out if there was a parrot out there in the world that was parsley green … this was before Google,” Dove said. One of her students confirmed that such parrots exist.
“She called one day and said she would be late to class. She was working at a pet shop, and they had a parrot. The next person hadn’t come in, and she couldn’t leave the parrot. I said, ‘can you take the parrot?’” Dove said, to laughter from the audience.
When asked about the relationship between her teaching and writing, Dove said that teaching helps her “explain something until it clicks” in her poetry. “I become much more aware of the things that I do in order to get at that true motion. It goes both ways,” she said.
Dove explained that she discourages students from seeking simple answers: “‘How do I become a writer?’ Well, you become, and you become, and you become.”
Following the event, Dove signed copies of her books for attendees.
The Reading Series will continue in the 2026–2027 academic year, with future events to be announced on the Bryn Mawr Reading Series page.
