Rita Dove was a majorette at Buchtel High School, so the Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. poet laureate knows football.
She’s a fan of basketball.
Baseball? Well, she’s watched “A League of Their Own.”
“I threw out a ball at a softball game once, which didn’t go well,” Dove said with a laugh. “I have huge respect for pitchers.”
Still, Dove said, being honored this summer by the minor league Akron RubberDucks with a bobblehead in her likeness — and the opportunity to once again try to get a baseball over home plate — is a thrill.
Her response to an email from the team asking if it could create the doll in her image was “shamefully quick,” she said — though she hasn’t yet agreed to toss the first pitch.
In her first attempt, more than 20 years ago, “I pitched underhand, and I almost reached the plate,” she said. “I don’t think I can do overhand.”
Bobblehead represents ‘Akron inventiveness’
Dove is one of three people the Double-A RubberDucks are turning into bobbleheads as part of Akron’s bicentennial festivities. The others are Gen. Simon Perkins, Akron’s founder, and Judy Resnik, the Firestone High School graduate and Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut who was killed in the rocket’s explosion in 1986.
Christina Gunter, the RubberDucks’ vice president of entertainment, said she wanted to make sure the team’s promotions covered a broad spectrum of interests and didn’t feel too similar to each other.
“There were so many good options,” Gunter said. “You had to be selective.”
Suggested Reading
Bobbleheads usually represent male athletes, so having two renowned, trailblazing women represented in the series was important to Mark Greer, the executive director of Akron 200. He’s glad that baseball attendees will have among their swag collections an engineer and a poet who wouldn’t traditionally get the sports-icon treatment.
Dove, who won the Pulitzer for her collection “Thomas and Beulah,” which imagined the lives of her maternal grandparents in Akron, was the first Black U.S. poet laureate.
“We want to really bring the bicentennial outside the confines of where people might assume they would expect it,” Greer said. “We didn’t want to just present Akron history in a library, on a stage somewhere. There’s no more Americana sport than baseball, so why not?”
The idea represents “such a wonderful Akron inventiveness,” Dove said. She grew up incredibly proud of her city.
“Akron had discovered everything, it seemed like. It was an amazing place,” she said.
Some of those other discoveries are also being honored this season by the minor league baseball team — the team is giving away T-shirts in honor of Akron’s bicentennial, celebrating everything from marbles to PVC pipes.
“It’s easy to forget how many things make Akron a special place,” Greer said. “See, what started here, it didn’t stay here.”
Bobblehead can bridge gap between arts and sports
Many of Dove’s poems are about the way contemporary events rub up against history, so it “just felt so right” that she should share the stage with other historic figures — including Perkins, the namesake of her junior high school. Dove said she found the experience strange and intriguing.
“In a way, it feels like this is a place where all these histories kind of meet,” she said. “I feel kind of valiant.”
She hasn’t yet seen a mock-up of her bobbleheaded self but said she sent pictures from every angle to help artists create an accurate representation. She hopes that young fans at the Aug. 23 baseball game where her bobblehead will be revealed see in her depiction that there are many ways a person can make a mark on the world.
People do that by doing best what they do best, she said — there is no set path for a life. Dove hopes that young people who may not be familiar with her work learn from the experience that she’s from Akron and ask what she did, leading them to the realization that they, too, can do anything.
It’s rare that poetry and sports share a stage, she said — though she noted there are plenty of great baseball poems, and she expects she’ll now add her own to the body of work. Whether a poem of hers appears on the scoreboard during the game or there are other nods to her work remains to be seen.
“Thomas and Beulah” takes place in Akron, and Dove has written poems with explicit and implicit references to the city. In “Wingfoot Lake,” she writes of Beulah, saying, “Where she came from / was the past, 12 miles into town / where nobody had locked their back door, / and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park / under the company symbol, a white foot / sprouting two small wings.”
“The Gorge” begins, “Little Cuyahoga’s done up left town. No one saw it leaving. / No one saw it leaving / Though it left a twig or two, / And a snaky line of rotting.”
Writing and poetry are about life, Dove said, and sports and literature are both work and art. She hopes she can help bridge the gap between the two. Maybe, she said, the bobblehead will depict her with a pen in one hand and a baseball in the other.
Prizes don’t sit on Dove’s desk, but bobblehead will
Regardless of what the bobblehead looks like, Dove knows where it will live — on her desk, along with family pictures and several talismans (and a picture of the actor Idris Elba that says “Shouldn’t you be writing?”). She said she’ll put the bobblehead “off to the side, so I can at least side-eye it every once in a while.”
Dove’s many prizes aren’t on her desk — there’s no space, and she doesn’t like to look at them.
“When I’m working, I can’t be thinking prizes,” she said.
The bobblehead feels like a recognition at the same level, but one with a sense of humor. There’s honor in having been chosen, and in the work of artisans that will go toward making her depiction. But it’s still something she can play with and touch.
“There’s a little bit of a smile when I think of it,” she said. “It will remind me not to be too serious when I’m writing.”
She doesn’t own any other bobbleheads, but Dove said she does want to get this season’s RubberDucks series, which she described as a sort of family.
“What’s different about this one is there’s so much love in it. It’s connected to my hometown,” she said. “It fills me with warmth every time I think about it.”
Then there’s that first pitch.
Dove will be days from her 73rd birthday at the August ball toss, so she hopes to be cut some slack on the ceremonial ritual.
“I’m not thinking about the length yet, ‘cause that will be daunting,” she said.
A professor at the University of Virginia, she plans to start lifting weights at the end of the semester in the hope of not embarrassing herself — Dove said she’s “weak as all get-out.” But she sees the tradition as a necessary piece of an experience that she’s otherwise delighted to be a part of.
“That pitch, that’s the thing that worries me the most,” she said. “The bobblehead, that pitch is how I earn it.”