When Rita Doves Cry

Dig if you will a picture: Rita Dove, Prince, and an infidel poet.

Prince released over 39 of his own albums and won seven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible (2004). In 1993, Prince announced his desire to go by "an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It's all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency," he wrote in a statement at the time. He was born June 7, 1958 and died April 21, 2016.

Rita Dove was born August 28, 1952. In 1987, she won the Pulitzer in Poetry for Thomas and Beulah (becoming only the 2nd African American to win that award, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950). She was US Poet Laureate from 1999-2000. Since 1989, she has taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Watch Rita Dove on the PBS News Hour here (~7 min).

Watch Prince in a 1999 appearance on The Larry King Show here (~40 min)

Regarding Judith Butler, here’s the full quote from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: “Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers.” 

 You can see Prof. Dove discuss her poetry as well as her first novel in an interview here (~25 min).

Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey present their work and are interviewed by Rudolph Byrd at Emory University and you can watch that conversation here (~75 min) 

About the Prince-Michael Jackson feud, Quincy Jones told GQ magazine that the beef  dated back to 1983, when the two attended a James Brown concert. Brown invited Jackson up on stage — and after Jackson treated the crowd to a few moments of singing and dancing, he asked Brown to bring up Prince. Jones later alleged that Prince felt like he'd been shown up — and accused him of making a half-hearted effort to run over Jackson after the show. 

Mary Shelley was the daughter of philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft, who died within 2 weeks of giving birth to Mary, and William Godwin. While Percy and Mary met when she was 16 (and she became pregnant by him at that time), she didn’t marry him until she was 19. She died of a brain tumor at age 53. She published Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was 20. She was, like her husband, a political radical at the time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792 and was 21 when he met Mary Godwin. You can read more about their courtship and marriage here. Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia while sailing home from a meeting with Byron, when his boat was overtaken by a storm. 

During the 19th century, the average age fell for English women, but it didn’t drop any lower than 22. Patterns varied depending on social and economic class, of course, with working-class women tending to marry slightly older than their aristocratic counterparts. But the prevailing modern idea that all English ladies wed before leaving their teenage years is well off the mark. While European noblewomen often married early, they were a small minority of the population, and the marriage certificates from Canterbury show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.

You can listen to Beyonce's “Break My Vogue” [Queens Remix] here (~6 min).