Rita Dove, Furious Flower Conference, Virginia, 1994

Rita Dove gave a reading at the very first Furious Flower conference in 1994 at James Madison University, which brought together over forty African-American poets, including Nikki Giovanni, Michael Harper, and the beloved Gwendolyn Brooks. Dove was Poet Laureate of the United States at the time. I was twenty and had newly fallen in love with poetry. When she rose to the podium, her poise was mesmerizing, a kind of shimmering restraint and a beautiful voice too. She read several poems, many from her then latest book, Grace Notes, including “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time before Bed,” which begins:

My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling.

Back then, men—and some women—could say penis or dick to an adult audience with tongue-in-cheek irony or swashbuckling bravado. But vagina? This was not a word one boldly pronounced in 1994. I sat up and paid attention. The poem goes on to address her young daughter’s bewilderment at her mother’s monthly period, wondering if the blood means it “hurts.” Rather than brush her daughter’s sincere question aside, the mother—the poet—puzzles out how to explain to her “it’s what makes us– / black mother, cream child.”

Now I teach African American literature, and that poem still makes many of my twenty-first-century college students squirm, a reaction that tells me there’s something deeply important about talking to girls about their bodies, and their mothers’ bodies, without shame, and talking about race and our rich, complex histories similarly without shying away. The book referred to in the poem’s title, Maurice Sendak’s classic Mickey in the Night Kitchen, has been on banned booklists for years for featuring illustrations of a naked boy. When it was first released, some librarians wanted Fruit of the Loom underwear added to cover up his penis before they’d allow it on their shelves. Sendak noted that we live in “a very strange society. I assumed everybody knew little boys had genitals and this wasn’t a breakthrough. I mean you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you go to the Frick and there’s a Christ child with his penis. It’s accepted in fine art, but somehow in books for children it’s taboo.” I hope I’m not stretching the analysis too far in saying that Dove likely found kinship with Sendak through their mutually forbidden subjects. It was a perfect poem to read at the Furious Flower conference, named for a line in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”: “The time / cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face / all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.”