One of the first things you notice on meeting Rita Dove is her nail polish. It's not one simple shade; it's not even two. Her nails are spotted, speckled, polka-dotted, in a handful of different colours. Her own word is "busy".
The same is true of her life as a writer: busy, alert to variety, uncompromising even in matters of leisure and ornament. She relaxes with crosswords ("My husband doesn't understand them. He says, `You do this to relax?' ") and the viola da gamba, an ancient ancestor of the cello she learned to play as a child.
Rita Dove has had a successful life, one her grandparents could scarcely have imagined possible. A brilliant student, she graduated summa cum laude from Miami University, Ohio, and had two semesters as a Fulbright scholar in Germany. She started publishing collections of her poetry in the 1980s and won the 1987 Pulitzer prize with Thomas and Beulah, poems loosely based on her grandparents' lives. She was the American poet laureate from 1993 to 1995, has won many other prizes, and is now Commonwealth Professor of English at Virginia University.
The work itself fills in the human details, including the struggles of her grandparents and of their forebears: her play, The Darker Side of the Earth, which is currently in production at the National Theatre in London, situates Oedipus Rex among the slaves in a cotton plantation in the American South.
Dove's is an archetypal story because it testifies to progress and meritocracy even as it reminds us how recent such progress is, and how fragile. She was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952, the daughter of a man who had broken through the race barrier in the 1950s to become the first black research chemist with Ford. He had graduated first in his class in chemistry and should have delivered the valedictory address for his year; instead the white man who came second did so. When his year graduated and took up jobs with Ford, he worked the lifts. Only pressure from his former classmates and professor led to Ford giving him a chance. "We didn't know this for years," Rita Dove says. "Later, when I asked my mother why he'd never said anything, she said it was because he'd wanted us to have hope."
Dove herself grew up in an increasingly un-segregated environment - "There were times when people would call you nigger, but I had some good friends among the whites" - and she was a majorette: "My friend and I were the first black girls on the squad, so we were breaking barriers, yes, but there wasn't a big problem with it."
Of her upbringing, she says: "We were first-generation rising middle-class. We were always told we were going to have to be better than everyone else, and so we did believe that if you were sure you'd done your best, then ultimately you'd prevail."
She eschewed the standard choices of law or medicine as a career and told her parents that she wanted to be a poet. "My father said, `Well, I don't understand poetry but if that's what you want that's fine. So long as you don't mind me not reading it.' It was wonderful - there was pressure when I was growing up, but it was never negative."
Dove's choice was vindicated when she became one of the youngest-ever poet laureates in the US. The post is not for life, and there are no obligations; there are some duties connected to advising the Library of Congress on acquisitions, and a flexible brief for the promotion of poetry. "I tried to energise the position," says Dove, "to raise the national consciousness of poetry in the States, which I don't think was very high."
She decided that if the media ignored poetry, poetry had to go to the media. She appeared on television, most strikingly alongside Big Bird on Sesame Street. She has been an ambassador for more than poetry: "Where I grew up," she recalls, "the feeling was that everything you did reflected on the black community."
Dove was only the second African-American poet to win a Pulitzer, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950. Even this year, her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn, assailed the prestigious Academy of American Poets for having an all-white board of chancellors, and Dove joined the fray. The board has now embraced all sorts of diversity.
Asked if she still feels like a representative of black women, she replies, "I accept it. It is unavoidable. I don't dislike it, I don't want to repudiate it, it's a fact of life. You see someone in a position who is a black woman and it does make an impression. We're not colour-blind or gender-blind yet. I wish we were, but we aren't. But I don't assume the role, and I try to gear my comments and behaviour to that; I try to be myself."
Her latest collection of poetry, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, takes the iconic moment when a woman refused to give up her seat on a bus during the era of segregation, triggering the civil rights actions that led to desegregation. The Darker Face of the Earth testifies to her concern with the history of African-American slavery. "Reading Oedipus always made me curious why it was so compelling when you knew the ending. I was thinking, `Is there any other situation that would be analogous in our society? Is it only because the Greek has this curse on him that it works? It's the unfolding of one character's fate, it's not his fault. But he assumes that burden of responsibility - it's very strange."
Instead of a Greek chorus, Dove has the slaves singing their "sorrow songs" and gossiping. "Slavery was a closed system; slaves didn't know where they were on the planet; there was no way out. What the master said was all they had: the Law, the Word of God. And it was whimsical, too, in the sense of deciding, oh, it was time to rape this person, oh, it was time to sell that one. As a community they were like the Greek chorus: they'd report to each other anything they knew."
The idea for the play came to her in 1979, when she had not yet published a volume of poetry. She didn't know the theatre world, and assumed her play "was everything people didn't want - too many characters, historical drama, adaptation of a classic . . . and poetic too! These were all the things to which the theatres would say, `No, no, no'."
She put it in a drawer for years. She was busy with her poetry and assumed that "it would never be performed in my lifetime". But she carried on working at it, and in the late 1980s the unperformed script was taken up by a small publisher. She was pleasantly surprised when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival asked to perform it.
"It gave me a chance to see it in action. We did a three-week workshop and they put me through the wringer. `Why is this, why is that?' It did need work." It gained and lost weight, at one point stretching to an unwieldy three hours before being ruthlessly pruned back to the lean musicality of the version at the National Theatre.
"A poem is a song without music," the Oedipus-figure, Alexander, explains. It's a neat line in her beautiful script, a subtly self-referential note. "I can't imagine being without music," says Dove, the viola da gamba player. "I've learned so much from it, and from voice work; and it all influences the poems, the way they sound."
This makes sense. In her poetry and in the verse play, Dove's phrasing and imagery are unambiguously, skilfully musical. What you notice first may be her fingernails, but what leaves a lasting impression is her voice.
Rita Dove speaks at the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, which runs for a week in Galway and Inis Mor, starting on August 15th