Dance sets poet on the path to healing -- and writing [US]:
Rita Dove hadn't really planned to write American Smooth (Norton, $22.95). Hadn't planned to deliver a collection of poems that move powerfully through war and motherhood and history and music. Hadn't planned to open a notebook and pour out its contents -- observations of life, really -- into an eighth volume of work.
But there was the matter of the fire. Four years ago, it stole Dove's home from her, without notice or invitation. Just like that.
In the healing that followed, Dove and her husband, German novelist Fred Viebahn, took to ballroom dancing. Something about its grace brought Dove some measure of peace.
''Sudden tragedy has a way of opening you up to other possibilities,'' says Dove, 51, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate. ``We did it as an exuberant distraction from our lives. It allowed us to live again, and all of a sudden poems began to happen.'' [...]
This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy
on Sunday, October 31, 2004 at 11:04 AM.
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