By CARROLL JOHNSON
Poet Laureate Rita Dove explored the poet's interior and exterior spaces in "Stepping Out: The Poet in the World," a lecture on May 5 that concluded LC's 1993-94 literary season. A companion lecture will launch the fall literary season at LC.
Forty-five minutes before the lecture began, people started gathering in the Montpelier Room to buy books, in hopes of getting one autographed by the poet, and to vie for a good seat.
Later, when Dove entered the room, a calm settled over the audience in anticipation of the poet "stepping out." In Part 1 of her lecture, "House and Yard," Ms. Dove said, "I want to explore the dynamics of inside vs. outside in some contemporary American poetry -- or to put it in the more provocative form of a question: Do we peer through a window at the world or do we step out to meet it?"
Answering her own question, Ms. Dove said that she began to examine her work and writing process. She recalled that as an "anxious and quite romantic graduate student," she read from Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space": "The houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us."
"This quote," said Dove, "has `lived on' in me, generating a kind of poetic consciousness of occupied space -- of the space we inhabit, of the shape of thought and the pressure of absence."
All of Ms. Dove's books but one bear titles "concerned with matters of definable space," she said. Leafing through those books, manuscripts in progress and old notebooks, she realized she was fascinated by occupied space. "Soon I made an unsettling discovery," she said. "I realized that quite a number of my poems take place in back yards. When the back yard is not explicitly present in the poem, it is implied. Even in poems in foreign landscapes, I remembered that while writing the poem I had imagined myself -- or the persona in the poem -- either to be standing behind a house or to be looking through a window at a yard."
The coming-of-age poem "Adolescence -- III," contains a back yard: "With dad gone, mom and I worked/The dusky rows of tomatoes/As they glowed orange in the sunlight/And rotted in shadow, I too/Grew orange and softer, swelling out/Starched cotton slips."
Ms. Dove discussed images used to lead audiences from "self- made interiors" to a world of exteriors: "The back door is the door of childhood. Countless movies and television sitcoms have exploited the real-life possibilities of this symbolism. A slamming screen door signals the child's defiance of parents and the adult world. What child hasn't run out the back door, in tears, vowing to go away and never come back and [said], 'Then they'll be sorry'?
"And the vista from the back yard is also many children's first -- albeit sheltered and contained -- vision of a larger world to explore. They can catch a glimpse of the possibilities of the 'open.' "
Historically, said Ms. Dove, the back door was assigned to children and servants. "Subordinates use back entrances. In Richard Wright's Native Son, the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is doomed from the moment he chooses to ring the front door of his new white employers' mansion, and the employer will be implicitly guilty in Bigger's crime when they allow him to enter through the front door," she said.
Some of the highlights from "A Toe Over the Threshold," Part II of her lecture, included Ms. Dove's description of a room she has occupied since her appointment as poet laureate -- the Poetry and Literature Office in the attic of the Jefferson Building. A journalist once asked her how it felt "to be stuck up in a corner of the building like this? Do you find it symbolic of the place poetry has in our society?"
She responded that she knew what he meant: "mad woman in the attic, starving writer in the garret, all that. Even James Thurber stuck his dotty grandfather in a bed in the attic.
"But consider: In the very center of our mighty nation's seat of government, the poet stands, perched, so to speak, atop the accumulated wisdom of the centuries (all those millions of books and recordings and other artifacts of knowledge -- art, manuscripts, music scores and even musical instruments) and looking down on the lawmakers and all the symbols of dominion -- for Washington is nothing if not a study in symbolic gestures. Domes and obelisks, columns and marbled stairs, statuary and fountains and rosettes carved in granite niches. What a view!"
The poet laureate also spoke about her theory of why poets are reluctant to "step out": "American poets rarely step into the outside world. By that I mean that the poems locate their musings inside rooms, often before windows or the shaving mirror, in bars and theaters and, as I just showed you with examples from my own work, the childhood back yard.
"Although we have our poets who speak up against the atrocities of life elsewhere -- be it the Holocaust or El Salvador or past horrors in the Dominican Republic or in America's antebellum South," said Ms. Dove, "I wonder why we have such difficulty stepping outside our metaphorical houses and talking to our neighbor across the street. Why is it so much easier to bear witness either to our interior spaces, our interior lives or to the life that is far away from us, the life we see reported on television or read about in books? If we can't take the immediate world around us as the case, isn't it more likely that we'll fall prey to the titillation of `safe' danger --usurping the suffering of others to serve the purposes of our quiet literary despairs?
"Perhaps what we contemporary American poets first must do is, as private citizens, to step out the front door and look around," she said. "Taste the air, see what is out there. Say hello to the stranger and join the community beyond the castle walls. Perhaps only then can we find the right mix between the interior moment and the pulse of the world. Perhaps when we begin to involve ourselves in the world, no matter on how local or limited a level, we will have begun to offer ourselves to the calling. Only then will we hear the resonance inside ourselves -- that place poet Muriel Rukeyser describes as `the inner condition of the body, the in-vironment.'
"And only then can we begin to take ourselves seriously as the kind of poets Friedreich Schiller calls `the unacknowledged legislators of the race,' " Ms. Dove concluded. "And at that point, my friends, the real work begins."
Carroll Johnson is on the staff of the Office of Communications.