The Icelandic Saga That Keeps Rita Dove Coming Back for More

The former poet laureate Rita Dove, whose new collection is “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” loves the Icelandic saga “Grettir the Strong”: “Bleak, modernist stuff! And yet revisiting that litany of betrayals and cruelties never fails to stir my spirits.”

What books are on your night stand?

Ah, there’s the rub — usually none! Or if there is one, then it’s the guilty-pleasure kind that won’t get in the way of falling asleep by stimulating my writer’s instincts — something like detective fiction, in paperback; I’ve never gotten used to reading on electronic devices. If I read poetry or anything remotely “literary,” a terrific image or eloquent turn of phrase may stun me into wakefulness; since I’m also one of the judges for the Anisfield-Wolf Awards, it can feel like work. So I usually snuggle into the pillows and solve a crossword puzzle or two. My husband is used to turning off the lamp and gently pulling pen and puzzle book out of my hands before turning off his own light.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

Does Shakespeare count? His plays are like novels, especially the tragedies! Otherwise, it’s a tossup between the TMs: Thomas Mann and Toni Morrison.

Whom do you consider the best writers — novelists, essayists, critics, memoirists, poets — working today?

I plead the Fifth.

Did you read poetry as a child? What books made you fall in love with poetry?

Around age 10, I managed to tug the two-volume Shakespeare from the top shelf in my family’s solarium; that was the beginning. I was reading the plays, not the sonnets; but they sang like poetry all the same. I’m embarrassed to admit that I memorized all of “Barbara Frietchie” for a fourth-grade project; I found that wretched ballad in yet another tome on that shelf: Louis Untermeyer’s “A Treasury of Great Poems: English and American,” which I used more like an encyclopedia than a sacred text. I had heard the story of my parent’s courtship so often (where Dad’s whispered “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” famously clinched the deal), that I searched the Untermeyer anthology for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet and memorized it so that I could chime in on my mom’s occasional nostalgic recitations — just to annoy her.

Was there a book of poems or a poet in particular that inspired you to write?

Not a specific poet or book, but the sheer variety of possibilities for singing with language fired my synapses — from Shakespeare to Mad magazine, listening to Bessie Smith or a Corelli flute sonata, collecting the fortunes on Salada tea bags. Before high school, reading poetry was my very private habit. I would sample poems from the Untermeyer anthology like dipping into a box of chocolates — let the book fall open, try on my tongue whatever offered itself. My first encounter with the divine William Blake, however, I owe to Mad magazine, where the lyrics satirizing a baseball team (“Tigers, Tigers, burning bright, / in the ballparks of the night, / your pitching’s good, your field adroit, / so why no pennants for Detroit?”) pricked my curiosity enough to send me looking for the poem it was based on. “The Tyger” proved a bit too fearsome for my juvenile sensibilities, but I commiserated with “The Sick Rose” and felt deliciously wicked reading “A Poison Tree” — so much gleeful unrepentance! (In my late 20s I first heard the recording of Allen Ginsberg singing “Tyger,” and the connection was so visceral — two great poets whose lavish, afflicted souls shared a vision — that it reignited the thrill I felt as a 10-year-old curled into a corner of the sofa, whispering those same words.)

When adolescence reared its head, it sent poetry scurrying for a short while. Thank heaven for Eugene O’Neill and Eugène Ionesco, whose plays transported me into high school, where poetry was waiting and “Dover Beach” became my go-to receptacle for all teenage dreams and despair. When my intrepid 11th-grade English teacher, Miss Oechsner, took a small group of kindred spirits to a Saturday afternoon book signing by a Real Live Writer, I bought and read John Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s “Inferno” — which, incidentally, I reread during our current pandemic. My college years were incandescent with more contemporary poets, revelation after revelation in exhilarating succession — Sylvia Plath, Mark Strand, James Wright, Robert Hayden; as a graduate student I’d make a beeline to the library stacks, Section 811: American Poetry in English — and check out 20 books every two weeks. Nowadays my own shelves are exploding, with upward of a hundred new titles pouring in each year; that’s just the poetry. It’s my wildest dreams on steroids! There’s a wealth of young poets writing today whose work continues to astonish and delight me.

Which poets continue to inspire you?

Oh gee! Emily Dickinson. Derek Walcott. Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Celan, but only in German. Shakespeare, of course. Adrienne Rich, Robert Hayden. Melvin Tolson’s “Harlem Gallery” is an outrageously erudite and madcap fugue, voiced by Black bourgeoisie of the ’60s; each time I read it, I hear something new. I also draw energy from a host of fiction writers — Ralph Ellison, Stefan Zweig, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez.

Are there poets for whom you’ve gained greater appreciation over time?

All of the above — Dickinson’s “Master” letters, Walcott’s “Odyssey.” Rilke’s “Elegies.” Celan is a lifelong commitment; luckily great poetry has no expiration date. Muriel Rukeyser was a midlife discovery. So was Alice Dunbar-Nelson, whom I’ve tried to coax out of the shadow of her first husband, Paul Laurence Dunbar; her poetry output was small but spectacular.

Do you see your poetry as having evolved over the course of your career? In what ways?

I don’t like to look back at what I’ve done; unlike Yeats, who was notorious for tweaking earlier poems, I try not to revise a poem once it’s appeared in a book. But when I was compiling my “Collected Poems,” the entire trajectory of my artistic life was laid out before me: I couldn’t avoid it. How fearless those early poems were! P.C. issues, sensitivity and discretion be damned: If the poem called, I answered, bold and clear. And the surrealism! There were elephants walking through a Midwestern neighborhood, Jefferson’s statue stalking the reflecting pool. After those stark dreamscapes, the poems became more lyrical; then narrative crept in — first as a frame, then a container that became more and more pliable, like a vase in constant re-contouring on the potter’s wheel. Writing a novel led to more elasticity in the poems, a loosening of the line. My musical training — cello, viola da gamba, classical voice — manifested in longer lines, loopier syntax; when my husband and I started taking ballroom dance lessons, the poems learned to relax into song, became more buoyant — at least, that’s my hope!

If you were to write something besides poetry, what would it be?

Plays. Without a doubt, I would be a playwright. My brother and I wrote radio plays when we were tweens. My father would hook a mic to the stereo system and we’d abscond to the kitchen to broadcast each freshly brewed concoction, our all-suffering parents listening from the living room as we plowed through implausible plot twists using exclamatory dialogue and deploying the obligatory sound effects, courtesy of the kitchen faucet — waterfalls and rushing rivers figured heavily in our story lines. I think I read as many plays in high school as novels; thanks to that early exposure to Shakespeare, I read theatrical scripts as easily and voraciously as poetry. Decades later I had the rare good fortune of seeing my one and only full-length play, “The Darker Face of the Earth,” premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are few thrills more intense, or more terrifying, than to sit in the darkened theater as the stage lights rise on one’s work. I find creating a play akin to writing poetry in many ways; the strictures of both forms appeal to me. The main reason I haven’t written more plays is a lack of time — plus, frankly, the collaborative aspects that accompany the original creation. Writing the script is exhilarating; dealing with directors and producers and set designers and actors, not so much. It’s frustrating to relinquish control of the text to interpretations or representations that may possibly alter the original intent; but a play needs to be produced in order to come alive, a process that involves compromises and budgets and effective teamwork — mechanisms that are anathema to the introvert in me.

What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

I mentioned Dante’s “Inferno” but not the equivocating “Purgatorio” or his “Paradiso,” which kind of plods along. James Merrill’s “The Changing Light at Sandover” is a modern-day “Inferno” that delights me more each time I return to its Ouija-driven Valhalla of characters. Boccaccio’s “Decameron” — another welcome exercise in pandemic reading. The Icelandic saga of “Grettir the Strong,” which I read aloud to my husband a number of years ago as we circumnavigated Iceland in a motor home during a nightless midsummer week, then revisited the choicer passages a few months later, back in Iceland during the daylight-deprived December solstice. It’s an amazing epic — as revenge-driven as the Greeks, with fight scenes rivaling today’s superhero action films; but there’s a little “Phantom of the Opera” in the mix. (Grettir is a foul-tempered hulk who can slay a boatload of men, then bust a rhyme about his deeds; but he’s also plagued by an undeserved curse and becomes a hunted outlaw who’s afraid of the dark, doomed to a peripatetic and lonely existence.) Bleak, modernist stuff! And yet revisiting that litany of betrayals and cruelties never fails to stir my spirits.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

Poetry, of course. Literary fiction. Mysteries. The German Novelle. Drama. Nonfiction has to be not only enlightening, but beautifully written. I avoid philosophy, abhor economics. I grow impatient with memoirs, but that’s probably because I’m currently hip-deep into writing my own.

How do you organize your books?

By genre, then alphabetically by author. There are designated shelves for my former students’ works — again, alphabetically by author, but the genres are mixed.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

“High Fashion Sewing Secrets.” “Return of the Bunny Suicides.” “Star Wars Origami.”

Do books serve a moral function, in your view? How so?

I don’t see how they could not. If we identify and interact with characters, even if we despise them or deplore their ethics, we have entered into a moral arena; their actions invite moral judgments. To empathize with a protagonist whose beliefs and customs are different from ours is to see the world from another’s viewpoint — and that kind of intimate understanding definitely serves a moral function.

You’re throwing a literary dinner party. What three writers, living or dead, do you invite?

James Baldwin. Emily Dickinson. And to round off the guest list, Sarra Copia Sullam, who played a pivotal role in the Jewish life of 16th-century Venice, though only a handful of her poems have survived. You might have expected me to invite Shakespeare, but he’s too dear. Beware of meeting your idols! I couldn’t bear the possibility of being disappointed.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

Must I confess? I’ve read books I’m supposed to revere that I’ve heartily disliked, such as Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”; I don’t feel it necessary to have read all of Henry James. But not to have read a major work of the canon at all is mortifying; I cringe to utter these dreaded two words: “Moby-Dick.” “Moby-Dick,” I have tried to read you, but not very hard; in fact, I have willfully ignored countless opportunities (Pandemic, are you listening?) to strike Ishmael and Ahab from the list.

What do you plan to read next?

Percival Everett’s “Telephone,” if I can get my hands on all the versions simultaneously. Who can resist a novel with three different endings? And poetry is always on the pile; I’m in need of a soul-boost, and the capacious odes in Barbara Hamby’s “Holoholo” are waiting. Having just returned from visiting my 7-year-old granddaughter in Arizona, who’s on the verge of turning the tables by reading to me instead of vice versa, I’m tempted to continue with the adventures of Nancy Drew — six down, 50 to go — since I’d refused to entertain the titian blonde’s overtures when I was young. Barbara Neely is on my shopping list, but I’m also two books behind in Louise Penny’s mysteries. We’ll see.