Crossing the Color Line at Iowa
The Yellow House on the Corner, Dove’s first book, published in 1980, reflects what was then called the New Black Aesthetic, which signaled the end of the Black Arts Movement in several important ways. The poems in the volume resonate with the New Black Aesthetic’s defining features of “borrowing across race and class lines, a parodic relationship to the Black Arts Movement, a new and unflinching look at black culture, [and] a belief in finding the universal in oneself and one’s experiences.”30 Her early experimentation with the universal in her own experience, particularly her adolescence, appears in her Iowa MFA thesis in poems such as “Adolescence II.” Highly prestigious journals including Antaeus and the Paris Review featured this and other poems from her thesis. “Adolescence II” and “Nigger Song” earned space in two high-profile anthologies at the time, The American Poetry Anthology and Eating the Menu. Both poems simultaneously departed from the Black Arts Movement and challenged the expectations of her Workshop classmates.
Dove’s Workshop classmates expected her writing to represent the Black Arts Movement primarily because they knew so little about the emergent New Black Aesthetic. “I was the only Black person in the Iowa workshop at the time, and I think many Black writers who have been in workshops will have had the same experience: you’re always the only one. There falls the burden,” not only of white guilt, but of advancing an aesthetic palatable to a white audience. Indeed, the chief complaint against her work was that her treatment of subjects was too abrasive and vitriolic. Such a situation arose when her poem “Kentucky, 1833” was spotlighted for discussion. It depicts a Sunday on a plantation, which is the “day of roughhousing,” music, and boxing that draws “Massa and his gentlemen friends” who “come to bet on the boys.” These celebrations quelled and redirected any underlying rebellious impulses so that slaves returned on Monday to their labor with new vigor. Dove captures the essence of this insidious design in how the young slave “Jason is bucking and prancing about” like an aroused animal, feeling his oats, spurred by “Massa” who “said his name reminded him of some sailor, a hero who crossed an ocean, looking for a golden cotton field.” The prose-poem’s final image is of Jason, the boxing match “winner,” “sprawled out under a tree and the sun,” looking at the sky as if it “were an omen we could not understand, the book that, if we could read, would change our lives.”31 In these last phrases the perspective poignantly shifts to the collective pronoun, extending Jason’s experience to the slave population as a whole.
The moving “Kentucky, 1833” stands as one of few exceptions to how Dove’s Workshop training, “which although helpful, had a stultifying effect on her poetry,” according to Malin Pereira, author of Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism.32 Peer criticism of this ambitious piece tellingly reflected the Workshop culture’s inability to appreciate the poem’s powerful expression of the New Black Aesthetic. Complaints centered around one comment, “Well, I feel like someone told me that in order to be healthy, I had to take a spoonful of medicine a day, but I’d rather take an apple a day,” which established the class consensus, Dove recalled. The point drove home how “for some people the horror of events and the political aspect of a poem make it impossible for them to see any aesthetic merits.” This accounts for “one reason poetry with political or sociological content often gets short shrift” and why it is “very hard for people to be able to discuss that material in a technical sense.” The opposition gave her valuable insight into her own potential: “At the same time, that comment was the first indication I had that I was onto something good.” She thus resolved to pursue what they told her to avoid.33
The criticism of “Kentucky, 1833” found fault not in its edifying glimpse at the injustice of a particularly pernicious aspect of slavery—the ideological import of its faux “celebrations” and system of rewards—so much as its method of doing so. Indeed, calling for “an apple a day” rather than the bitter “spoonful of medicine” she was offering spoke of the white readership’s demand for black experience rooted in the triumphalist narrative of the Black Arts Movement.34 The New Black Aesthetic, as her poem demonstrates, takes a fearless look at black experience not to create an essentialist view of it, but to broaden it across racial and historical boundaries. Labor exploitation, literacy, and capitalism resonate beyond the historically specific subject while revealing a painful glimpse at a day in the life of a Sunday on the plantation.
The most pivotal year of Dove’s early career occurred in 1976, which marked the official end of the Black Arts Movement as well as her introduction to Viebahn and the IWP. Signs of the Black Arts Movement’s long decline surfaced as early as 1959, in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. A key scene in it depicts the young, idealistic Beneatha Younger’s indoctrination into Afrocentrism by her new boyfriend, who plays a recording of tribal music for her. Beneatha’s drunken brother Walter Younger unexpectedly stumbles in from the local bar, jumps on the coffee table, and launches into a mock oration as if he were a warrior chief. The scene calls attention to the Black Arts Movement’s ignorance of pressing contemporary urban problems in the African-American community such as alcoholism and unemployment. This was one of many critiques exposing how the movement unraveled in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to such criticism, “the black revolutionary journals also lost their constituency.” By the early 1970s the most significant of them, Black Dialogue (1964–1970), Liberator (1961–1973), and Journal of Black Poetry (1966–1973), all ceased publication. By the time Dove arrived at Iowa in 1975, they were all defunct, except for the Black Arts Movement’s flagship journal, Black World, which finally ceased in February 1976, during her second year. By the time of her graduation from the Workshop in 1977, the culture “experienced a marked impetus toward more consciously literary and theoretically based analyses of African-American texts.”35 That year the Modern Language Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities endorsed a new study aimed at liberating critical discourse from “fundamentally ideological or sociological methodologies that tended toward the naively reductive.”36 It was precisely that naively reductive critical discourse that frustrated Dove’s attempts to write poetry like “Kentucky, 1833” at the Workshop.
Dove refused the role of spokesperson of her race. “Given my middle-class background, there were many kinds of experiences that I had which could not only have been experienced by Blacks.” “Adolescence II,” for example, depicts a surreal scene of searching sexual awakening whose poignant vulnerability explodes the sanctioned racial valor of the Black Arts Movement. This and other poems about adolescence that appeared in The Yellow House on the Corner engaged “topics, which were for everyone.” Therefore she “submitted them to magazines with that in mind. The slave narratives came a bit later,” with the notable exceptions of “Kentucky, 1833,” and “The Transport of Slaves from Maryland to Mississippi,” both of which encountered resistance in workshop discussions.37 The latter is a stirring pastiche of historical prose and poetry describing a slave mutiny on a wagon train ironically sabotaged by “a slave woman” who “helped the Negro driver mount his horse and ride for help.”38 It offers an early glimpse of Dove’s powerful experimentation with nonfiction sources, which reached full fruition in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Thomas and Beulah (1986), her narrative verse rendering of her grandparents’ history. Such transgression across genres began for her in Stanley Plumly’s Forms of Poetry course, which she found “absolutely liberating: we read prose—not just fiction, but imaginative nonfiction memoire, travelogues.” The environment, unlike her other Workshop courses, appealed to her because of its crossover dynamic that resulted in “a class of poets discussing the strategies of prose.”39
Dove’s difficult decision not to send her manuscripts to “Black magazines” speaks to the depth of her disaffiliation from the Black Arts Movement. Pressure mounted at Iowa to adopt more palatable modes of expressing political subjects and to localize her subjects instead of crossing
cultural boundaries. She actively “resisted being typecast,” which posed a particularly difficult challenge, since Toni Morrison and Alice Walker had not yet made it “possible for people to imagine that a black writer doesn’t have to write about ghettos.” The Workshop, rather than the more eclectic and culturally diverse IWP, had not shown signs of “a readiness for people to accept” individuality “on both sides, Black and white.” The program’s racial politics in 1978 still reflected the attitude of the 1960s, when authors of color were expected only to “write what they know” and mainly represent their race. The strident first wave of “necessary overkill” was essential for placing race on the literary and political agenda in the 1960s, because “in order to develop Black consciousness it was important to stress Blackness, to make sure the poems talked about being Black, because it had never really been talked about.”40
The Workshop’s habitual assessment of authors of “minority groups” according to “whether they adhere to a genre” presented a barrier to creativity for Dove. She looked to Zora Neale Hurston as a model for how an African-American woman writer could avoid this trap, in which “the genre is making them, instead of them making literature.” Dove knew that writers of color who define themselves as cosmopolitan could often be accused of “being too loud,” on one hand, or absurdly, “playing up to whites” on the other.41 This crossing of boundaries played a major role in her first book after the Workshop. The Yellow House on the Corner is deliberately “very domestic,” yet with the intention of reaching beyond parochial boundaries. The life she depicts there, like the house itself, “is on the corner,” she reminds us, “on the edge of domesticity,” poised to evoke “a sense of something beyond that—outside of that boundary, there is something else.”42 Whereas Cisneros embraced her role as representative of inner-city working-class Latino Americans, Dove refused to play a similar role on behalf of African Americans. Although Dove was “incredibly excited about some aspects of the Black Arts Movement” in the late 1960s, she increasingly saw it as an industry that compromised the complexity of the notion of “black art.” “The concept is not pure,” she argued, because “the insistence on black art is just a device, a way of establishing territory or generating publicity.”43
Dove knew she could not accurately speak for a ghettoized black American adolescence, given the middle-class privilege of her upbringing in Akron, Ohio. Her childhood home was filled with her father’s German books from his war years—he insisted on learning the language of the enemy—as well as scientific journals and texts that were tokens of his status as the first African-American chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.44 Surrounded by more material than she could read, she was stimulated by “all these different cultures that swirled around” her. “I experienced the world as a kind of feast, a banquet,” she recalled.45 She was named a Presidential Scholar, one of the nation’s top one hundred high-school seniors, and graduated summa cum laude in 1973 at Miami of Ohio. These were “rather sheltered college years at Miami University, in the rural setting of southwestern Ohio” where she “filled the role of the striving, gifted Black student.” In Germany, and later in Iowa, she “was on display” in these strange environments “where some people pointed fingers at me and others pitied me as a symbol of centuries of brutality and injustice against Blacks.” Whereas she felt alienated while living abroad, “both from my home country and from the place I was in,” she also recognized how “serious travel can heighten the awareness of a writer to see many sides of a story.”46 Occupying that liminal space in Germany had an illuminating effect on her powers of observation. At Iowa, her development came under threat from the retrograde racial politics of the Workshop, but the IWP provided an outlet for the development of her newly acquired skills in German language and literature.
Dove dared to cross more than just color lines at Iowa. Her core principle, “I just don’t believe in boundaries,” is embodied in her willingness to venture into unfamiliar cultural terrain.47 Occupying both African-American and international literary worlds, she “refuses and ironizes clichéd political discourse and aesthetic dilettantism,” as critic Terry Steffen points out.48 Her Imagistic personal lyric mode, for example, is on display in works such as “Adolescence II.” “Can you feel it yet?” ask the surreal “seal-men with eyes as round as dinner plates” to the speaker of the poem, who is on the verge of her sexual awakening. They wait for a reply but she does not know what to say. “They chuckle” and vanish, with a knowing “Well, maybe next time.”49 “Adolescence II” stands with “Nigger Song: An Odyssey” among her greatest Iowa achievements, the latter of which staunchly refuses conventional racial discourse.
The ironic political discourse of Dove’s poetry was inspired in part by contemporary East German authors. Since “overtly political opinions other than party line were not allowed,” they encoded their writings with political significance. No matter how abstract or highly subjective East German poetry may appear on the surface, “there is always something in between the lines talking about oppression,” Dove explains. But for many East Germans exiled to West Germany, that political edge embedded in richly metaphorical language became dull. Sara Kirsch epitomized how the “latest poems seem very lax” after the transition to the West. Dove suspected that indifferent audiences in Western capitalist culture “took the wind out of the sails” of such Eastern dissent writers.50
Dove’s engagement with the German language at Iowa through Viebahn and the IWP encouraged exploration into what was then considered forbidden territory for an African-American woman writer. “Agosta the Winged Man” and “Rasha the Black Dove” explicitly deal with German subjects, and thus risked stirring controversy, particularly among advocates of the Black Arts Movement. She imagined their objections: “Why are you writing about a white—German!—artist?” To avert such a hostile reception, she deliberately avoided exposure. “I didn’t think I was strong enough to withstand the political fallout,” she confessed. Thus she opted to “keep out of the political fray” by withholding such volatile material from publication. She “waited” and “stepped out as a writer later, when things became more tolerant.”51
Dove’s thesis supervisor, Louise Glück, played a strong role in encouraging her work with German subjects, as in “The Bird Frau.”52 As a New Yorker born of Hungarian immigrants, Glück lent a vital internationalist perspective to Dove. In her thirties, with only a single volume of poetry to her credit, Firstborn (1968), Glück advised Dove at Iowa from 1975 to 1977. Unlike other faculty members who attracted graduate student advisees through their literary awards and star-studded publication records, Glück appealed to Dove amid the narrowly Americanist Workshop faculty. It was not until decades later that Glück’s star rose when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night in 2014. Glück, like Viebahn, provided a vital bridge to foreign subjects. Her influence testifies to how Dove believed “one of the greatest tragedies of the Black Arts Movement was its insistence upon Afrocentric arts to the exclusion of others.” Such an exclusive purview was tantamount to insisting that “all the world’s resources were traitorous somehow,” she contended.53
The expectation that African-American writers must be limited to functioning as “the medium for proposing activist solutions to racial problems or for explicit black proselytizing” struck Dove as profoundly incongruous to her creative development.54 She also denied other doctrinaire uses of literature, particularly the Workshop’s nationalistic rhetoric handed down from the Cold War. At Iowa, the IWP occupied a liminal space in the bureaucratic infrastructure of the university. Its balanced representation of authors from Chile, Ceylon, Taiwan, and Romania formed a kind of literary United Nations. Since IWP writers did not come to Iowa to pursue a degree, and since Iowa did not subsidize them through grants, the IWP’s funding structure demanded almost twice as much capital as the Workshop. But with Engle’s massive industrial and federal network financially backing Iowa’s litera
ry mission, the IWP flourished. The bulk of the capital necessary to run the IWP came from a rich wellspring outside of Iowa, just as it had for the Workshop. Indeed, of the $200,000 Engle raised for the Workshop in 1966, less that $10,000 in revenue was drawn from Iowa sources.55
Thus with little local funding to support the international travel and monthly stipend for scholars like Viebahn, Engle had to look to other sources. These invariably included U.S. embassies and cultural affairs bureaus, which began to send “the best talent from their assigned countries.” Viebahn ranked at the top of Germany’s list, and thus received federal support for his visit, funded in part by the U.S. Information Agency. Engle’s explicit aim was to win favor abroad for the U.S. capitalist system and its attendant political democracy, a Cold War objective embedded in the Workshop and its aesthetics that Workshop alumnus Eric Bennett and critic Mark McGurl have discussed.56 Engle boasted, “the first books that show America in a positive light in Hungarian, Rumanian, and Polish were written by writers in our program.” In addition to providing a stimulating outlet for seasoned worldly young authors like Dove, Engle’s concern was ideological. This is evidenced by how he touted Xiao Qian in 1979 as “the first prose writer from the People’s Republic of China to visit America since 1949.” After his IWP visit, Engle reported with pride that Qian’s piece in the People’s Daily “was the first article praising our competitive system ever to appear” in that journal, “which is read by 500 million people.” To avoid the appearance of producing apologists on behalf of free market capitalism, Engle pointed out that the Chinese novelist Ding Ling, who served two prison terms in her country for her political activism, came to the IWP to spread the message of human rights in the free world.57 Indeed, as Bennett points out, “Engle’s vision for institutionalized creative writing was both shaped and motivated by the Cold War” in an attempt to use “culture (and government help) to fight communism.”58 Bennett dates the Cold War at Iowa from 1945 to 1965, but evidence suggests the vestiges of its rhetoric persisted well into the 1970s in certain instances.
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