The Black Aesthetic in Rita Dove’s Playlist for the Apocalypse

Abstract

To Rita Dove, a renowned poet of great transformations and eclectic artistry, blackness is an aesthetic that must be embraced and celebrated. It is the project of this paper to reflect on the black aesthetic depicted in Rita Dove’s Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021); a breakthrough volume presenting blackness as an “Ars Poetica” an “X marks the spot” leading to Dove’s signature crossing. In this volume, Dove presents a playlist of the everyday and of the nation's history over the past fifty years. The title of the volume, while acknowledging the sequential playfulness of a music playlist, it maintains a cadence of finality brought about by the word “apocalypse.” Playlist for the Apocalypse presents “a lifetime of song” dramatizing Dove’s view of the idea of the apocalypse as both end and resurrection recorded in personal triumphs and pains as her stories meet with the grand arc of history. Keywords: Black aesthetic, grand arc of history, music, vocalization, orchestration, memory, race, anger, resignation, disease, death, resurrection