Rita Dove in conversation with Jericho Brown

The Best American Poetry blog has posted a long conversation between Jericho Brown and Rita Dove. Dove recently compiled and edited The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, a collection which has stirred some controversy.

Their conversation sprawls in many directions, touching on mentorship, Ohio's literary culture, the writing process, East Coast parochialism, the critical neglect of the Black Arts Movement, and the grand saga of permission fees in the poetry world ("nothing shook my belief in the goodness of human beings like trying to secure the rights to reprint [Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and Sterling Brown]," says Dove). Woah.

Here she is on why she decided to edit The Anthology:

The detective in me was aroused, the desire to investigate more deeply. But the main reason was that I would have an excuse – no, the duty -- to reread all those extraordinary poems I had encountered in my life, plus discover important poems I might have missed for one reason or another. I would have an excuse to set aside the demands of daily life – all for the sake of poems that I loved, admired, even those I had pushed back against, poems whose message I might loathe and yet found powerful in their approach to language, to human expression. I would have an excuse to learn and indulge. At that point, at the beginning of my journey through the American century of poetry, I did not yet have to dwell on the hard practicalities – that I would have to make difficult decisions, to offer myself up to multi-faceted attacks, to be second-guessed and ridiculed by nay-sayers spurred by their own nefarious agendas.

The journey took about four years. I approached it as I often approach writing poetry: I opened myself to the century's many pushes and shoves, I read voraciously, indiscriminately at first -- gimme some Frost, ah, there's dear Bishop, mmm Crane needs to be in the mix, of course, and Dunbar, and Cullen, and and and... . Reading the letters of one poet might pique my interest in another, and so on. In time, patterns began to emerge -- different camps, surprising entanglements, confusing juxtapositions -- these patterns quite often resisted easy assignment to one group or another.

Would I do it again? Hell, no! But I'm glad I did it this one time.

Wonder who Dove might mean when she says, "nay-sayers spurred by their own nefarious agendas"? Well, she names names. Read on:

Jericho: Why is it that poets and critics feel free to publicly and privately attack a master like Gwendolyn Brooks (and subtly attack all black women poets) for no reason other than the fact that Brooks “confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race”?

Rita: Jericho, your bafflement is as profound as mine. I fear the answer isn’t pretty. Maybe that’s why you and I -- who prefer not to dwell too long in the company of hate, malice, and selfishness -- are baffled instead. I asked the same of Helen Vendler in my rebuttal to her weird attack in the New York Review of Books recently. Well, this much perhaps: People identify with their heroes, and when they perceive an attack on those heroes, even if it's only happening in their own deluded minds, they will try to fight back, and in the process sometimes turn into shamelessly unreasonable proxies. They scream and kick and punch into thin air, hoping to land a hit. What does it say about Vendler that out of the 175 poets in the Penguin Anthology she chose Gwendolyn Brooks and Melvin Tolson and Amiri Baraka to try to skewer me? Frankly, I felt a bit embarrassed for her -- and perplexed that someone who had once championed my work could expose herself with such a shallow paradigm.

Read the whole interview here.