Returning to Rita Dove

Fourteen years ago, I produced Rita Dove: An American Poet, a biographical film that captured something essential about one of America's most important voices. You can watch the documentary below.

Now, as Rita and I prepare to embark on a new cinematic journey exploring her epic poem Sonata Mulattica, I find myself revisiting that first collaboration—not out of nostalgia, but to understand who we were then, what we captured, and how far we've traveled since.

The film traced Rita's life from Akron, Ohio to Germany, from the intimacy of a cello's embrace to the vastness of her father's telescope pointing toward distant stars. In those hours of conversation, she spoke about geography and belonging, music and memory, what she called "telescoping distance and telescoping time." She told me about discovering small towns in Germany, villages where people still lived where their ancestors had lived since the 16th century. This awakened in her a fascination with her own Akron, the rubber capital of the world, nestled between river valleys. "I need to feel why I'm standing right where we are at that moment," she said. "I need to feel why or how I fit on the earth."

Watch the entire film here.

This sense of place—physical, emotional, historical—became the foundation of Thomas and Beulah, her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection. She described Thomas arriving north during the Great Migration, working in the Zeppelin factory, carrying the guilt of survival, haunted by his friend Lem who drowned in the Mississippi. Every Zeppelin reminded him of being someone who managed to float away from the morass, like Jonah in the belly of the whale, like Noah in the Ark—both the one who gets away and the one who carries the guilt of those who didn't make it. Then came the Zeppelin disaster, the Akron, with men holding it down as it tried to take off, one man hanging on and then dropping, falling and falling to his death. An American nightmare. Thomas survives intact while others cannot hang on to that American dream. Exploring Thomas and Beulah with Rita served as my entry point into Jacob Lawrence's world, which has since become the language with which I think about the Great Migration when I do.

At ten years old, Rita chose the cello because it "sounded luscious—like something you could just eat." She had no idea what a cello was, and when she saw how big it was, her heart sank. But she thought, this is what you chose, this is what you take. She grew to love it, the way you could wrap yourself around it, enveloping the sound. By college, she faced an impossible choice: musician or poet? She was playing in New York City, taking lessons, loving the way her individual part flowed into the whole. But stage fright made her knee shake during performances, and the cello requires stillness. Music would always be with her, she decided, a vocation but not her profession. Those loves were equal then. They remain equal still.

She was eleven in 1963 when her family drove to Washington for the March on August 28th, her birthday. Her period had started. Her childhood was ending. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of dreams. Weeks later, four girls died in a Birmingham church bombing. She told me about feeling ripped out of her student self, beginning to realize that her very personal existence was tied up with a social consciousness, a world she had to negotiate. The personal and political collapsed into one another that year, never to separate again.

Then there was Mexico, driving down from Akron with her family, stopping at relatives in Georgia and Florida where she first experienced the deep South, segregated beaches, her cousins laughing as they ran across the line between "ours" and "theirs" while she felt terrified. But in Mexico everything changed. For the first time in her life, she felt like she wasn't beleaguered. She hadn't realized she was being beleaguered until that moment of freedom, of people welcoming them, curious about Ohio and their license plates more than the color of their skin. She discovered Diego Rivera there, those enormous murals that assumed the world was his platform, a fearlessness and connection to a larger humanity that blasted through the sense of being under siege. Watching the 8mm film shot by her father in Mexico, where she appears visiting Diego and Frida's home, reminded me of my own experience, of my own father at the same place recording the silhouettes of my brother and me walking around the legendary house. That coincidence brought me closer to Rita, as if we were siblings traveling in parallel universes and our fathers masters of the universe.

Germany came later, on a Fulbright in 1974. She went to places her family couldn't imagine a Black person would live. She met Germans as individual human beings, not as the monsters of World War II or the great masters of literature she'd studied. She experienced the incredible load of guilt every German felt they had to work through, the reflexive defiance of young Germans looking for another victim to point fingers at so people would stop pointing at them. As a young Black American woman, many assumed she was on the side of the right, that she knew what it meant to be oppressed by her government. They were actually right, she told me. She did feel from a very young age that there was one law for most of America and another that could be applied to her race, that she needed to tread carefully. But stepping into Germany was almost schizophrenic—she was against the war, yes, but she also felt that Germans were perhaps the last people to be pointing fingers.

She spoke about standing in front of a painting in Berlin in the 1980s, Augusta, the Winged Man and Rajah, the Black Dove, painted by someone who couldn't have known her, yet she felt he was painting her predicament—pairing a man who was difficult, deformed, someone people would stare at, with a completely normal woman except that she was Black.

The young woman in that first film already understood what it means to stand at intersections: Black and American, woman and scholar, personal and historical, intimate and vast. She already knew that "outer space is inconceivably intimate," that distance telescopes both up and in, that time collapses when you're simultaneously a child and an adult understanding how your father's telescope was his way of speaking to you, of being close.

Returning to Rita Dove

Now we prepare to explore Sonata Mulattica, the story of George Bridgetower, the mixed-race violin virtuoso who inspired then was erased by Beethoven. It feels like the inevitable next chapter—another story of someone standing at impossible intersections, another exploration of how art transcends and is trapped by the circumstances of its creation, another meditation on who gets remembered and why.

Fourteen years later, we return—not to repeat ourselves, but to discover what new territory we can map together. The journey continues.