Rita Dove: Finding a Different Way Out
- Eduardo Montes-Bradley
- Sep 15
- 5 min read
Letters in the mailbox are rare these days, and meaningful ones rarer still. So I imagined what it might feel like to receive one — postmarked in Berlin, from someone who once knew my father, carrying reflections on the labor of love Rita and I undertook so many years ago. What follows is that letter, composed in the spirit of memory and invention.
My dear Eduardo,
Please forgive the intrusion of this letter, sent by post in an age that has forgotten such things. My methods, like my body, are old-fashioned. My name is Albert Imhoff, and I was a friend of your father’s, back when the world was a different shape. We were of an age, he and I, born into the maelstrom of 1935, and we found in each other a shared language—a need to make sense of the fractured histories we had inherited.
I was deeply saddened to learn of Nelson’s passing two years ago. The news reached me slowly, as news often does. In the silence that followed, I thought of him often, and of you. He spoke of your work with an immense pride that always managed to travel down the telephone line from his home to my quiet apartment here in Berlin. And so, when I heard that you had made a film about the American poet Rita Dove, I knew I had to find a way to experience it. That old bridge between your father and me, a bridge I thought had vanished with him, suddenly seemed one I was compelled to cross.
As you know, my world has long been one of silence and darkness. I arranged for the transcript of your film to be sent to me from two different sources, to be certain of its accuracy, and had it rendered into Braille. Over several weeks, I have sat with it, my fingertips tracing the architecture of Ms. Dove’s life as captured through your lens. What I discovered was so profound, so resonant with the themes Nelson and I debated over decades, that I felt I was not merely reading a text, but continuing a conversation with my old friend, through you.
He would have been so very proud, Eduardo. Proud of the sensitivity and the intellectual honesty of this work. And so, in his memory, I offer you these thoughts. This is my last will, of a sort. A final piece of criticism I feel I must share, in the hope that you might see fit to publish it.
Commentary on the Film Rita Dove: An American Poet
What you have constructed is not so much a film as it is a literary artifact of the highest order. Stripped of image and sound, which I cannot perceive, the text stands on its own as a meditation on what the poet herself calls the "telescoping" of existence. It is this principle that forms the core of the work, collapsing the immense distances between time, geography, and human souls into moments of "inconceivably intimate" understanding.
She speaks of Germany in terms of "cartoon images"—the land of "monsters" or the land of the "great masters". She came here not for the monsters, but for the masters, wishing to study the Germany of Hölderlin, Heine, and Goethe. And so, you can imagine my quiet delight, my friend, when my fingers traced the passage where she reveals her own special connection to that world. She speaks of feeling a "kinship with Goethe" because they share a birthday. A small fact, perhaps, but to an old man like me, it feels like a thread of destiny woven between your film's subject and the very soul of our literature. It seems she took to heart Goethe’s own words: ‘Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.’ (He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.) For it was only by immersing herself in our world that she could truly begin to excavate the layers of her own past in Akron. By seeing our geography, she was able to question her own, finding the "seeds for my book Thomas and Beulah" and learning to see the earth she came from by standing on foreign ground.
And how devastatingly she sees America. Your film’s text masterfully juxtaposes the "American dream" with the "American nightmare". The story of Thomas in the Zeppelin factory is a portrait of industrial terror. He arrives seeking a dream and finds himself in the "belly of the whale," a thundering, spark-filled cage where survival itself becomes a source of guilt. The image she describes—a man clinging to the rising airship, the very symbol of that dream, only to fall and fall to his death—is a truth that resonates powerfully in a European soul. We, too, have seen our dreams of progress become vehicles of death. She captures the fragility of hope, the weight that survivors like Thomas carry, feeling they are "both" Noah on the ark and Jonah in the beast, bearing "all the guilt of those who didn't make it".
But the true genius of this text, for one such as me, is its reliance on a language of pure feeling, translated through the fingertips. I cannot hear the "luscious" sound of the cello, but I can feel the choice she had to make when her own body betrayed her with a knee that "would shake" uncontrollably. And I was profoundly moved by her account of Mexico. After the terror of a segregated beach, she describes the feeling in Mexico as one of not being "beleaguered". This is a masterful description not of a presence, but of an absence—the sudden lifting of a weight she had not realized she was carrying. It is a feeling only accessible through language, and her chosen word is perfect. It was there, seeing the fearless, world-embracing murals of Diego Rivera, that she found an art that "blasted through that beleagueredness" and connected her to a "larger humanity".
In the end, that is what this work is about: connection across impossible divides. In a Berlin gallery, years before, she felt a painter had seen into her very soul, capturing her "predicament". Reading her words, transcribed into the Braille beneath my fingers, I felt the same. Here was an African-American woman, born a generation after me, whose journey through her past, through her art, explained my own world back to me.
She concludes with a brilliant metaphor. She gives directions to her house, but insists "you're going to have to find your way out again by yourself". The journey changes you. You cannot simply retrace your steps. Your film, my friend, has been such a journey for me. It has led me back across the years to my friendship with your father.
The ultimate question is posed: is the port worth the cruise? Her answer is the only one that has ever mattered in life, or in art.
"The cruise is".
Thank you, Eduardo, for allowing me this final voyage. Yours in memory and literature,
Albert Imhoff
Berlin, August, 2025
Very moving and on the mark!