Rita Dove’s slickly written poems are professional in a completely professional way. Her poems have a message, though rarely a subtle message—more often it’s a billboard or full-page ad. I understand why Black poets, particularly ones as venerated as the former poet laureate (sixteen honorary doctorates and counting), are under pressure to be Role Models and write Public Poetry that will instill Ethnic Pride and Celebrate Diversity (such poets’ dreams are in Capital Letters). On the Bus with Rosa Parks is less a book of poetry than a public relations exercise.[1]
When you live the public life too long, when you’re used to standing on stage with celebrities speaking to celebrities, receiving Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year Award or the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement (can such a thing exist?), when university presidents practically hurl themselves beneath buses attempting to give you honorary degrees, it’s easy to forget how easy it is to write bad poetry, that the best intentions, in this best of all possible worlds, won’t help when the words lie dead on the page. You might want to write a poem that will encourage children to read, and you might go about it like this (the poem is titled “The First Book”):
Open it.Go ahead, it won’t bite.
Well … maybe a little.More a nip, like. A tingle.
It’s pleasurable, really.You see, it keeps on opening.
You may fall in.Sure,
