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 in her lilting and steady cadences. And such range. Dove opened her reading with “Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove” about a painting based on real individuals who were made into sideshow spectacles, and “Parsley,” about the 1937 Parsley Massacre under Rafael Trujillo. She then turned to what was her most recent collection Grace Notes, introducing “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed,” in which a children’s book, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, inspires Dove’s three-year-old daughter to ask about her vagina and “She demands / to see mine and momentarily / we’re a lopsided star / among the spilled toys….” My own parents were raised with what we call today “body shame,” which, unexamined, they passed on to their children. To interrupt such shames, I needed another guide, another template. I needed this poem. Thank you, Rita Dove.