by Rita Dove
“Sarra’s Blues”: Sarra spent her entire life in the Ghetto of Venice. Several times during her literary career, she needed to defend herself against those she’d once considered mentors—men who attempted to discredit her accomplishments and impugn her faith. One teacher even ran an elaborate scam to extract gifts and money from his munificent pupil.
“Aubade: The Constitutional”: Rabbi, scholar and writer Leone da Modena aka Leon Modena (1571–1648) was a close friend of the Sullam family.
“Transit”: The speaker is the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer (1903–2014), survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
“Youth Sunday”: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by members of the local Ku Klux Klan on the morning of September 15, 1963, killing four African-American girls and injuring fourteen other people.
Spring Cricket
“Postlude”: The quote is from Jules Massenet’s 1899 opera Cendrillon (“reste au foyer, petit grillon”) and refers to the Charles Dickens novella The Cricket on the Hearth.
A Standing Witness
In 2017, the composer Richard Danielpour approached me with the daunting yet intriguing proposal to collaborate on a song cycle, bearing witness to the last fifty-odd years of American history. The poems in this section are my contribution to the collaboration with Danielpour and Copland House in Peekskill, New York, that became A Standing Witness. The world premiere had been planned for the 2020 Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, to be followed by a number of performances at other venues, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, sung by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham; due to the Coronavirus pandemic all those presentations had to be postponed.
The titles for the testimonies have been plucked from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
“Beside the Golden Door”: Overview of the beauty and misery that has been the history of America. The speaker identifies herself as a witness and nothing more.
“Your Tired, Your Poor . . .”: Two assassinations. The Democratic National Convention. Social crisis. The Vietnam War crescendos.
“Bridged Air”: Moon landing. Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix plays the Star-Spangled Banner at the end of the festival.
“Giant”: Bombing of Cambodia. Muhammad Ali refuses to be enlisted.
“Huddle”: Richard Nixon, Watergate. The Vietnam War winds down.
“Woman, Aflame”: Roe v. Wade—a seemingly decisive women’s rights victory.
“Mother of Exiles”: The hostage crisis in Iran shakes a nation. Vigil.
“Wretched”: The AIDS epidemic, and America’s reaction to it.
“Limbs Astride, Land to Land”: The Soviet Union crashes—and with it the Berlin Wall. First Gulf War.
“World-Wide Welcome”: An epidemic of greed. Technology takes a leap; news and information accumulation speeds up. “Can I have some more, sir?”
“Imprisoned Lightning”: Fall of the Twin Towers, and the second war in Iraq.
“Send These to Me”: Barack Obama. The reemergence of the American Dream.
“Keep Your Storied Pomp”: Donald Trump. The rise of neo-fascism in America. The war on immigrants. The media demonized.
“The Sunset Gates”: Our standing witness finally identifies herself.
Eight Angry Odes
“Ode to My Right Knee”: Challenged by my students to assign myself a poetry exercise as wild as the ones I’d given them, this is what I came up with: Write a poem in which each line is dedicated to a different letter of the alphabet—that is, the line must use only words starting with that letter. Although the selection of letters and their order was open, it was a doozy nevertheless!
Little Book of Woe
On December 7, 1997, I woke up, stepped in the shower, and discovered that I was numb from the chest down. It took a few terrifying years before the cavalcade of bizarre, shifting symptoms manifested into a clear diagnosis: Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis. Early predictions were dire, envisaging progressive immobility and a wheelchair-bound future. But I was lucky. Although I struggled with increasing fatigue and lost feeling in my extremities—which made writing by hand harder and harder and playing the cello and my beloved viola da gamba impossible—pharmaceutical science came to the rescue. While I floundered between alternating bouts of fear and depression, my husband researched treatment options and suggested I opt for a drug that had only recently been approved. I will forever be grateful to my medical team at the University of Virginia for being game to try what then was less proven. As the years scrolled by, the frequency and severity of my relapses wondrously diminished, symptoms began to flatten out, and MRI scans verified that the improvements I was experiencing were real. All this time I hid what was happening to me from the public—first and foremost to spare my aging parents, but also because I needed to become acquainted with the new me before other people weighed in; the last thing the poet in me wanted was pity. So I kept traveling all over the world with my husband always near, just in case. I relearned walking steadily through ballroom dancing, which taught me how numb toes could gauge balance by how much pressure was exerted on the floor; I got stumbling under control. I stopped pushing myself to do everything for everyone. I’m still figuring out how to compose poems on the keyboard but have been able to resort to some handwriting again. Nowadays, after over two decades with MS, the sword above my head seems blunted enough that I often forget it’s still there; the sting of my nightly injections is a small price to pay for having a semblance of my old healthy life back.
“Rive d’Urale”: In 1989, that year’s fellows at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, commissioned a collaborative work from me and Polish artist Ewa Kuryluk. Ewa designed a permanent installation featuring two scrolls, one vertical with her red drawing, and one horizontal with my poem. The title “Rive d’Urale”—French for “at the outskirts of the Ural”—came from rearranging the letters in our names and alludes to the political unrest growing in that region at the time. A few months later, the Berlin Wall fell.
Acknowledgments
American Poetry Review: “Declaration of Interdependence”; “Ode on a Shopping List Found in Last Season’s Shorts”; “The Terror and the Pity”; “This is the Poem I Did Not Write”
American Scholar: “No Color”
The Believer: “Hip Hop Cricket”; “The Spring Cricket’s Discourse on Critics”
The Black Scholar: “Elevator Man, 1949”
Callaloo: “Family Reunion” (as “Reunion, 2005”); “Rive d’Urale”; “Scarf” (in slightly different form)
Chicago Quarterly Review: “Climacteric”; “Shakespeare Doesn’t Care”
Connotation Press: “Anniversary”
CUE—A Journal of Prose Poetry: “Prose in a Small Space”
Georgia Review: “Aubade: The Constitutional”; “Aubade East”; “Aubade West”; “Ghettoland: Exeunt”; “Lucille, Post-Operative Years”
Harvard Review: “The Angry Odes: An Introduction”; “Eurydice, Turning”; “Rosary”
Iowa Review: “Blues, Straight”; “Green Koan”; “A Sonnet for the Sonnet”; “The Spring Cricket’s Grievance”
Kenyon Review: “Island”; “Soup”; “The Spring Cricket Observes Valentine’s Day”
The New York Times Sunday Magazine: “Youth Sunday”
The New Yorker: “Bellringer”; “Found Sonnet: The Wig”; “Last Words”; “Pedestrian Crossing, Charlottesville”; “The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude”; “Vacation”; “Wayfarer’s Night Song”
Orion: “Pearl on Wednesdays”
Paris Review: “Naji, 14. Philadelphia.”; “Postlude”
Ploughshares: “Mercy”
Poem-a-Day: “Borderline Mambo”; “Trans-”; “Transit”; “Your Tired, Your Poor . . .” (as “Testimony: 1968”)
Poet Lore: “The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude”
Poetry: “Mirror”; “Voiceover”
The Root: “Trayvon, Redux”
Slate: “Insomnia Etiquette”
Virginia Quarterly Review: “Ode to My Right Knee”
“A·wing´” first appeared in Something Understood, ed. Stephen Burt and Nick Halpern, University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Much of the section After Egypt (“Foundry”; “Sarra’s Answer”; “Sarra’s Blues”; “Aubade: The Constitutional”; “Sketch for Terezín”; “Orders of the Day”; “Transit”; “Aubade East”; “Trayvon, Redux”; “Aubade West”; “Ghettoland: Exeunt”) appeared as “Reimagining the Ghetto” in Poems for Sarra / Poesie per Sara (Damocle Edizioni, Venice, Italy, 2018). “Girls on the Town, 1946” was commissioned by The Academy of American Poets and The New York Philharmonic as part of their Project 19 initiative.
“Youth Sunday” was commissioned for the special issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine that evolved into The 1619 Project.
“Orders of the Day” and “Sketch for Terezín” originally appeared in Liberation: New Works on Freedom from Internationally Renowned Poets, ed. Mark Ludwig (Beacon Press, 2015).
A Standing Witness: A collaboration commissioned by Copland House in Peekskill, New York, the 14 poems comprising this lyric sequence have been set to music by composer Richard Danielpour and are scheduled to be premiered by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham in 2021/22.
Heartfelt gratitude goes to Jill Bialosky for her part in shepherding this book into the world. Thanks to Aviva Dove-Viebahn for being a stimulating sounding board as well as an ever-smart daughter. As for Fred Viebahn, my around-the-clock confidante and midnight editor—there aren’t words enough to sing his praises and my love, again and again.
Also by Rita Dove
Collected Poems: 1974–2004
The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (editor)
Sonata Mulattica (poems)
American Smooth (poems)
On the Bus with Rosa Parks (poems)
The Poet’s World (essays)
Mother Love (poems)
The Darker Face of the Earth (verse drama)
Selected Poems
Through the Ivory Gate (novel)
Grace Notes (poems)
Thomas and Beulah (poems)
Fifth Sunday (short stories)
Museum (poems)
The Yellow House on the Corner (poems)
Copyright © 2021 by Rita Dove
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Jacket photograph Aviva Dove-Viebahn
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Dove, Rita, author.
Title: Playlist for the Apocalypse : poems / Rita Dove.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011714 | ISBN 9780393867770 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393867787 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3554.O884 P58 2021 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011714
ISBN 978-0-393-86777-0
ISBN 978-0-393-86778-7 (ebk.)
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