17 pages • 34 minutes read
Fifth Grade Autobiography
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Family Reunion” by Rita Dove (2007)
This poem first appeared in the journal Callaloo. The poem treats the themes of family and memory from an adult perspective. While Dove’s “Fifth Grade Autobiography” is also in adult language and from a mature perspective, “Family Reunion” goes one step further, adding the highly educated point of view of the adult speaker, as in the lines: “It's all here, / the beautiful geometry of Mendel's peas / and their grim logic—” (Lines 38-40). Unlike “Fifth Grade Autobiography,” this “Family Reunion” focuses on celebrating the living instead of dwelling on those who have passed on.
“History Lesson” by Natasha Trethewey (2000)
This poem from fellow poet laureate Natasha Trethewey considers a family photograph from when the speaker was four, just as in “Fifth Grade Autobiography.” Instead of concentrating on familial relations and memories, however, the speaker is alone in the photograph and reflects on the fact that unlike the segregated beach of her grandmother’s youth, the beach is now open to everyone. By connecting the speaker’s four-year-old self to a photograph of the poet’s grandmother at the same age, Trethewey successfully blends the personal and the political, as Dove also does in many poems.
“Primer” by Rita Dove (1995)
From Dove’s collection Mother Love, this poem centers on a speaker just one year older than the young girl in “Fifth Grade Autobiography.” This poem includes context about the speaker at that age, who is “chased home” (Line 1) and called “Brainiac! and Mrs. Stringbean!” (Line 4). The confrontation ends when her “five-foot-zero mother drove up / in her Caddie to shake them down to size” (Lines 10-11). The speaker, too proud to accept help, promises to “grow up” (Line 14) and experience the passage of time.
Further Literary Resources
“Rita Dove: ‘We aren’t lost’” by Rita Dove and Chet’la Sebree (2021)
This interview, published in Guernica, celebrates the publication of Dove’s latest book, Playlist for the Apocalypse. Though this collection was published decades after “Fifth Grade Autobiography,” it includes at least one poem written in the same year, 1989. As a result, this is a free-ranging, career-spanning collection whose creation Dove describes as follows:
I have poems which, through the years, I thought were finished, and some of them had been published, but which had not come together in a collection. I gathered them all up. They were already in a folder, but I spread them out; I threw them on the floor, and I started walking among them. We just had days of special conversation.
Dove and Sebree discuss everything from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia to the ways Dove’s writing process has changed as a result of her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, an ailment she has lived with for a number of years. Finally, while they never discuss “Fifth Grade Autobiography” directly, Dove says, “Though I don’t like to write about myself per se, I should amend that and say I don’t like to write an unfiltered self.”
“Grace Notes, by Rita Dove” by Alfred Corn (1990)
This review from Poetry magazine focuses on the collection that includes “Fifth Grade Autobiography.” While offering reservations about some poems in the collection, Corn asserts, “When memory and narrative come to shore up the dreamwork, though, Dove is on sure ground” (37). This sentence sums up “Fifth Grade Autobiography” nicely, for in it, according to Corn, she captures her grandfather “with a novelist’s verve and a poet’s economy” (38). The review provides insight into Dove’s work and quotations from various poems.
“Everyday and Imagined: Empowered Girlhood at Home in the Poetry of Rita Dove” by Maria Proitsaki (2010)
Proitsaki’s article, originally published in the journal Moderna språk
, considers Dove’s work, from Yellow House on the Corner (1980) through 1995’s The Poet’s World. Using scholar bell hooks’s work as her entry point, Proitsaki applies a feminist-critical lens to Dove’s poetry and prose. Proitsaki sums up Dove’s oeuvre here:
…the female poetic personas experience their girlhood in peaceful and nurturing domestic milieus, where they have opportunities to develop their strengths. At an early age, girls hide in their games, form alliances, read, learn and even join the boys (31).
Listen to Poem
Jay Ruud, of the YouTube channel “Poems with Dogs,” reads “Fifth Grade Autobiography.”
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By Rita Dove
