A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  In light of Dove’s creative paralysis after graduation from the Workshop, her MFA thesis bears the unmistakable imprint of the Workshop pedagogy and curriculum. Her schooling interfered with her education, as Mark Twain would have it, through training “in sensation and the manipulation of representation in The Image,” according to Robert McDowell. “The standard lesson plan, devised to reflect the ascendancy of Wallace Stevens and a corrupt revision of T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative, instructed young writers to renounce realistic depiction and offer it up to the province of prose.” The result was a narrowing of poetry into “subjectivity and imagination-as-image; it has strangled a generation of poems.” Dove’s peers became pretending play-actors, or “dissemblers,” in this manner, a tendency she simultaneously resisted and replicated.13

  Between flashes of brilliance, her MFA thesis is a derivative youthful imitation of the styles and subjects of H.D. and Dove’s thesis supervisor, Louise Glück. Her riddle poems, for example, are the products of a Workshop exercise in writing poetry without naming the subject. “Riddle” demonstrates her mastery of the assignment. “When I see you, my intestines/ squirm,” it begins, followed by a series of clever images ending with her subject’s violent end: “Rain drives your family to the sidewalks,/ where their split pink tongues accuse each pedestrian of murder.” The poem remains straitjacketed both by the parameters of the assignment and Dove’s response to it with this gratuitous teacher-pleasing confection, a graduate version of her earlier acculturation into the role of high school honor student. Much of her thesis amounts to such well-executed classroom exercises as “Riddle: The Vase.” In it, Dove strains for the classical imagery of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “It is the graven image of a poem/ whose clay feet are natural,/ who stands on a waxed table,” the pun on anthropomorphic and poetic feet all too conspicuous as she rounds out the portrait in “its dirt belly stuffed with tulips/ or peacock feathers.”14 Such striving yet constrained work possessed enough nascent creative power to meet her instructor’s expectations and withstand the scrutiny of her peers. But soon after graduation, it became clear to her that such success was hollow. Catering too obediently to institutional demands, she realized, threatened to domesticate her expansive international vision, which eventually revolutionized the world of poetry.

  The German Connection

  By her second year in the program, Dove grew increasingly discontented with the Workshop’s American literary focus, which proved too narrow for her worldly purview. Crossing over to the eclectic and diverse culture of the International Writing Program, if only informally as a charter member of sorts, infused her with new vigor. American perspectives on race had tried her patience. She recalled standing out for all the wrong reasons: “I was the only Black person in the Iowa workshop at the time,” which burdened her with “other people’s guilt.” Even without that burden, “being a student in a creative writing workshop is a very naked experience,” leaving young idealistic minds vulnerable to damaging criticism. Add to this the predicament of being “the only person representing any other culture, and you’re setting yourself up doubly,” she explains. Guilt can play havoc with critical standards. She noticed that her peers lowered their aesthetic standards when her poetry was up for review. With her race in mind, “they started making allowances” for her identity “as a hyphenated poet—as an African-American-woman-poet, or a Latin-American-gay-poet, or whatever.” When the burden of guilt mounts, suddenly “the rigor drops; it’s this condescension which is so insulting, because as a serious writer one approaches the art with all the rigor of non-hyphenated poets.” At workshop sessions, she could see the pattern repeatedly in her fellow students, who would not “talk about the poem in terms of techniques or its aesthetic,” but only “the subject matter.” Thus “poems dealing specifically with my heritage,” she attested, “always got the worst,” as in the least helpful, “comments, because people could not find a way around the guilt.”15

  The third floor of the English-Philosophy Building was home to the International Writing Program (IWP), where Dove found welcome relief from such condescension. Fred Viebahn, a young German poet, epitomized the prevailing attitude toward her poetry among scholars visiting from abroad through the IWP, a non-degree-granting program that offered housing and office space for up to five months at a time. Viebahn was among the IWP fellows, an eclectic blend of twenty-five visitors per year who occupied an entire floor of the Mayflower dormitory north of campus by City Park on Dubuque Street. They came from all over the world, representing more than twenty different nations at any given time. Paul Engle, along with Hualing Nieh, raised over $3 million from 1967 through the early 1990s, which allowed more than seven hundred writers to immerse themselves in the literary culture of Iowa City.16 Viebahn was a beneficiary of this sinecure, which afforded him an extended period unburdened by teaching requirements to pursue his creative endeavors, conduct research and translation projects, and explore the region. The primary purpose was to offer writers a creative space and an opportunity to share their nation’s literature and their latest projects at a two-hour non-credit seminar held once a week on a rotating basis. Dove attended these seminars, drawing stimulation from the rich array of literatures and authors on display. In this environment, she could circulate with scholars who were not American and thus bore none of the guilt of the U.S. slave-holding past when interacting with her. IWP scholars not only treated her on equal footing, they also took active interest in her German proficiency as a valuable skill otherwise overlooked in the Workshop’s limited curriculum and culture.

  Dove noticed at Iowa “that everything ran by clique. The fiction writers stuck together, the poets stuck together,” and even “the wrestlers had a bar” and “the visual artists had a bar.” The social subdivisions were impermeable, a caste system that seemed “crazy” to her. The urge to explore other groups was sacrilege, an unpardonable sin that was actively denied. “I remember trying to get a couple of the graduate students in the Writers’ Workshop to come to some of the seminars” for the IWP, she recalled. To her shock, “they shied away,” seeming “not to want to see and hear from writers other than a few select Americans.” She “was rather disgusted by that,” knowing that xenophobia deterred some, while others “wanted to believe that they were the only writers in the world.” This was exactly “the kind of arrogance” she despised most. The cliques within the Workshop itself also seemed to raise insurmountable barriers dividing young scholars from fruitful exchanges. Not only was there a “reluctance to meet foreign writers”: an equally powerful pressure to “stick to your group” of narrow subcultures designated by genre delimited literary and creative expansion.17 After being awarded a Teaching/Writing Fellowship, Dove was offered office space in the English-Philosophy Building, but was told that she might find her office mate unacceptable. She shot back a look of disbelief to the inquiring secretary, Connie Brothers, asking, “Is there something wrong with him?” Brothers replied, “No, we just wanted to check” since he was in fiction and not poetry. Expecting a refusal or some sort of compromise, Brothers was stunned that she was open to meeting another student outside of her specialization. “Sure, that would be wonderful,” Dove said without hesitation. Reflecting years later on the entrenched segregation of Workshop students according to genre, she commented that “the notion of prose writing and poetry writing as separate entities has been artificially created, partly as a result of fitting writing into the academic curriculum where it is easiest to teach them separately.” In her own work after graduation, poetry and fiction indeed became “part of the same process” because “it’s all writing; there are just different ways of going about it.” Looking back on her days at Iowa, she frankly revealed, “one of the things I deplored when I was in graduate school was just how separate the two were kept; the fiction writers and the poetry writers didn’t even go to the same parties.”18

  The social dynamic at Iowa for Dove, as for Harjo and Cisneros, embo
died the intellectual climate. Harjo and Cisneros faced a different challenge, because, unlike Dove, they did not venture beyond the exclusive Workshop circles. Dove instead discovered in the IWP a vast and thriving network of scholars eager to exchange ideas and launch projects. She removed herself from the “high-powered” gatherings that consisted of “more political shuffling” than “students getting together and caring for one another.” She “simply withdrew from that” because she “just didn’t like it, and so the second year I don’t think very many people saw me.” She “said bye after class and went to my apartment” but more often to the IWP offices or to the Mayflower dormitory that housed the international writers. She knew “the first year might have slowed me down in terms of poetry,” but she was determined to cross campus and reach out to this community of scholars from across the globe to prevent it from occurring again during the second.19

  Just as Dove’s original decision as a youth in Akron, Ohio, to study German was an act of rebellion against the institutional conformity of her junior high school that favored French, she reached out—against all social cues and cultural precedence—to the international students. “Always a maverick,” as she later described herself.20 Unlike her self-conscious Workshop classmates struggling to define themselves in the process of their professional development, the IWP’s authors “had paid their dues” and “had been working at it a long time.”21 These foreign writers appealed to Dove the same way Ralph Waldo Emerson had gravitated toward the “finished men” in his circle of protégés a century earlier in the creative writing enclave of Concord, Massachusetts. They had outgrown the strident and often histrionic self-expression of early development and now bore a firm confidence in their aesthetic and professional visions. Dove similarly relished the opportunity to escape the pressure-filled cliques dividing the hypercompetitive young writers of the Workshop for a group of accomplished professionals who had advanced beyond the angst of the self-conscious developmental phase. They were eager to take her into the fold, rather than compete with her.

  By the end of the spring semester of 1976 at the Workshop, Dove’s extended time away from Germany had begun to take its toll on her fluency. Her mastery of the German language held special value, since it brought her both social autonomy and access to her own untapped aesthetic power through an undiscovered rich literary tradition. To sharpen her edge, she volunteered as a translator for what the IWP established later that year as the Translation Workshop. Transgressing into the IWP offices from the Workshop as none of her classmates had, Dove inquired about the availability of such work. “If there’s a German writer,” she offered, “I’d be willing to help translate” for the fall semester of 1976.22 Enter the bespectacled, bright-eyed Fred Viebahn, a wellspring of energy with a quick smile and flowing locks cascading over his shoulders, a creature like none she had encountered in the Workshop.

  Viebahn breezed into Iowa City a literary prodigy, a wunderkind from Cologne with six book-length publications including a novella, volumes of poetry and short stories, two novels, and a play to his credit at the age of twenty-nine. His first book, Die Schwarzen Tauben—which prophetically translates as The Black Doves—was named the German Book of the Month in 1969. In 1973 he won the literary prize for young writers of the City of Cologne, and his first play, Blutschwestern, debuted on stage in 1976 at Torturmtheater Sommerhausen. Unlike Dove’s Workshop classmates, Viebahn was a seasoned and accomplished author. Soon after the wheels of his plane skidded onto the tarmac of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport marking his first day in the country, IWP fellow Peter Nazareth greeted him and drove him to Paul Engle’s house in Iowa City. Once there, he was introduced to a bright young Workshop student; “she was beautiful,” he recalled, immediately attracted to “her colorful fingernails and fluent German.”23 To his delight, she had introduced herself in his native language, this time playing the role of accommodating host rather than the culture-shocked Auslander she had been in Tübingen. The circumstances for their falling in love at that instant could not have been better orchestrated. Viebahn’s overwhelming sense of presentiment on his first day in America met with Dove’s joy in reawakening her slumbering verbal prowess in the German language.

  The longhaired and leather-jacketed German intellectual seemed heaven sent in his woody 1970 station wagon and John Lennon glasses. A photograph of the striking couple—confident, carefree and on the brink of literary greatness—posing next to the vehicle captures them basking in the sun at the beginning of their lifelong emotional and intellectual journey together. Known for its agriculture and conventional midwestern homogeneity, the state of Iowa in the mid-1970s seems an improbable place for the meeting of this transnational interracial intellectual couple. Dove never would have expected it herself based on her first impression of Iowa. When she turned on the TV several days before her Workshop courses commenced in late August 1976, only to discover “the pig reports” and little else, she wondered, “What am I doing here?” Spending her twenty-third birthday inexorably alone in this barren farmland left her “completely depressed.” Two years later, however, she would learn that Iowa, particularly through programs such as the IWP, was a relative bastion of progressive racial politics compared with institutions such as Florida State University in Tallahassee. A job offer at FSU presented a tempting opportunity, but the couple demurred because they “felt uneasy taking an interracial relationship to upstate Florida.”24

  Connie Brothers, the Workshop secretary in 1975, remembered the couple as a perfectly suited pair whose long-term future together seemed as if it had been aligned in the stars. “She married him” four years later, in 1979, Brothers said, noting that everyone familiar with them was not surprised. “Rita was and still is outgoing,” Brothers recalled, noting that she began her efflorescence when the stranger from Cologne entered the scene. That fall of 1976, Dove was awarded “a teaching/writing fellowship [that is the Workshop’s] very best category of financial aid.” She proved to be “fabulous” as an instructor that semester, “since she had such a wonderful personality” and sophisticated background in literature and culture. Brothers described how Viebahn and Dove frequently “met on the same floor of EPB [the English-Philosophy Building],” and at other gatherings arranged by Engle. She explained how “in those days, Paul Engle wanted students from the Workshop to get to know the people in the IWP, so he had a number of social events that allowed that to happen.”25 Whereas Engle had encouraged collaboration with the Workshop in order to build on the momentum established by the program, the Workshop director John Leggett had little incentive to reach out to the IWP. The IWP’s purpose and scope existed entirely outside required courses, faculty, and degree granting for which the Workshop was responsible.

  Although Engle actively encouraged Viebahn and Dove’s collaboration, she “stopped translating his work” if for no better reason than she had fallen in love with him. Their intimacy heightened expectations for translation beyond what either of them could realistically reach. She could hardly conceal her anger, calling to his attention the flaws, “you know there’s this, you missed that.” Likewise, he would find fault in her translations of his German poems, because she “couldn’t get something into English.”26 Ironically, the work that united them precipitated the first major conflict of their relationship. Putting an end to translating each other’s work opened up new channels for collaboration. Indeed, Dove credits Viebahn for many of her daring crossovers into other genres and subjects, including her first novel, Through the Ivory Gate. In the acknowledgments, she writes, “My heartfelt gratitude goes to my husband, Fred Viebahn, who literally ‘made me do it.’ ”27

  Viebahn’s translations of Dove’s poetry into German proved especially difficult because they were written according to the Imagist aesthetic inspired by the poetry of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Successfully translating these works was nearly impossible for him, given the surreal disconnected images of her verse, which eluded his own mastery of English. To Dove’s good fortune, L
ouise Glück, whose approach is heavily influenced by the Imagists, arrived at the Workshop for the fall semester of 1976 for a one-year appointment as visiting lecturer. Although her classroom teaching was not effective in Dove’s estimation, “Glück was extremely good one-on-one; she was uncanny.”28 Integral to the aesthetic of H.D.’s Hermetic Definition, which Glück introduced to Dove, is the exploration of unconscious urges of guilt, sex, and love.

  The writings of H.D. were perhaps even more influential on Dove than the tutelage offered by Glück. Both the prose and poetry of H.D. had been nothing short of a revelation for her at the Workshop, as she was transfixed by its “strange and wonderful” powers that were “so very musical in its own insistent phrasing.” Indeed, the distilled intensity of H.D. meant that she could only “take her in very small doses,” a mind so brilliant she feared she would “start sounding like her.” She admired H.D.’s capacity “to take the outrageous circumstances of her life” and craft something “which was absolutely beautiful” and “not be self-indulgent” or “confessional in any sense.”29