In 1995, I was halfway through my third sputtering year at the University of Pittsburgh where I was spending an ever-dwindling quantity of my time in the writing department where, according to my major, I was moored.
I found myself hiding out, as I thought of it, further up the precipitous and echoing stairwells of the Cathedral of Learning in the bright aerie of the Religious Studies department. I preferred discussing snake handlers and cargo cults, the works of Mircea Eliade and, occasionally, Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, with the head of the department, Paula Kane, in her office rather than talking about the craft of versifying and what was at risk in my latest poetic offerings with my cohort in the workshops I was supposed to be attending.
I was working nights at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland, where I’d been employed in Second Stack, part of the mysterious and prohibited-to-the-public underworld of the Main Branch, since the summer of 1990. Here I sorted bin after bin of returned books, piling secondary bins to send off to other departments via the incredibly unreliable staff elevator. I organized and tightly packed the oh-so-tippable carts I used to trundle around the Humanities Department shelving scores of novels, cookbooks, literary criticism, and poetry. Nearly all of these were housed in extremely greasy and indeterminably stained dustjacket protectors.
The young woman I was dating then, let’s call her Al, was completing a degree in Library Science. After shutting out the lights on Second Stack for the night, I would walk the couple of blocks to meet her after her late class. Instead of loitering outside the Information Sciences building I would wait for her on the steps of the Music Building. In my memory, it is always drizzly and cold or else there’s a light dander of snow lazily falling on these nights. It wouldn’t be until years later that I learned this building, where I occasionally listened to old jazz records for a class I was taking with Nathan Davis, was also home to the original Neighborhood of Make-Believe of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood fame.
The traffic on Fifth Avenue was sparse. A clunking city bus or two, a handful of university employees in their cars quietly making their way out of Oakland. I took shelter under the covered entrance to the Music Building and watched the students disperse while clutching my beat-up, temperamental Walkman. I still have the BASF 90 cassette with the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” dubbed from my vinyl copy on one side and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” on the other.
The music and the Pittsburgh precipitation certainly reinforced an inner dissonance, a feeling of opposing forces grinding up against one another. The weather couldn’t decide what it was supposed to be — rain or snow. The music was dichotomous, a song or two of wistfulness and heartbreak from the Californians, maybe “Caroline, No” or “God Only Knows”, then eventually that lonely midnight train at the crossing, a dog barking uselessly into the night. A flip of the tape and I was joined by a motley crew beamed in from Jersey in the likes of “Johnny 99” and the “Highway Patrolman”. People who were more isolated and fucked up than myself, I thought.
Al and I would break up that winter. I was confused and floundering. I wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to be a writer from Pittsburgh, not a writer in Pittsburgh. I feared I would never leave this city. When I looked at the city I saw something small and provincial. I saw something uninspiring that was best left behind. Icouldn’t see the city at all. And as a result of that particular failure, neither could I see myself very well. A vague thing to myself and to others is what I was. It would take time to learn how to see.
The British art critic John Berger wrote, “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Part of the problem, as far as my relation to Pittsburgh goes, was that in 1995 I did not like what I saw when I looked at the city.
It would be another ten years before the work would begin on removing all the accumulated grime and soot of decades from the buildings that I was surrounded by. In 1995, the Cathedral of Learning and the Carnegie Museums and Libraries were still sheathed in an oppressive black film; layer upon carboniferous layer of mill-smoke draped the Oakland architecture in heavy dark sheets of smut.
Winter in Pittsburgh could feel like someone you loved left the room and, on their way out, carelessly flipped a switch and turned off all the color.
In January of that year, the University of Pittsburgh Press published Jan Beatty’s first full-length collection of poems Mad River. I probably first heard about Beatty’s book from Bob Hoover’s weekly book column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Mention of the book would have immediately caught my attention. Here was a book of poems by a contemporary Pittsburgh poet that put the experience of living in this city front and center. Books like that, as far as I knew, did not get published every day.
If Hoover’s column appeared on Sunday, then Monday morning would have found me in the Pitt Book Center’s compact poetry section thumbing through the crisp pages of Beatty’s book. I would have turned directly to her “Pittsburgh Poem”, as I also had a “Pittsburgh Poem” tucked into the unrevised sprawl of my own manuscript in process. Here’s what I would have read:
On Sarah Street in the South Side,
the old woman still stands with her broom, imagining
the air full of lug and swish from the steelworker’s boot,
armies of gray lunchbuckets grace her thoughts
as she sweeps with the part of her that still believes;
sweeps while her sister makes paska and horseradish with red beets,
sweeps away the stains of a dead husband and a disappointing daughter
I hated it.
When I was in high school, a handful of my writerly classmates and I were invited to a cross-school literary gathering hosted by the Fox Chapel High School lit-crew called Tapestry. During the event, the local poet Michael Wurster gave a reading, in which, during an aside between poems offered, from his point of view, a universal truth. He told the crowd of fidgety adolescents that “Everyone should write a poem about a steel mill.”
Granted, I was only a teenager at the time with not many years under my belt, and admittedly, had little in the ways of worldliness, but I was certain in the moment Wurster made his declaration that I had never heard anything so absurd in my life. Why the hell would I ever want to write about a steel mill? The idea of it, well, I couldn’t see it.
Jump ahead to that morning paging through Jan Beatty’s book and there I was reading a poem about an old woman sweeping her stoop in the shadow of a steel mill. I put the book back on the shelf and didn’t look at it again for quite some time.
That, of course, was a mistake. Beatty’s poem continues:
She thinks of the dark well of J & L, how it sifted down to nothing,
the mill’s hole of a mouth that ate full years of her life,
nights she pulled her husband from Yarsky’s bar across the street,
him smiling like a bagful of dimes, half a paycheck spent,
the whole time soot covering their clothes, the car, the windowsills,
like disease, someone else’s hands.
Beatty’s strands of clauses could almost be a six-fingered fist: polydactyl and pissed off. Here in her deliberate pacing, she renders a particular stream of consciousness. This woman is her own river, but a river no longer wild and rushing with white foam, now almost still, certainly its depths are a mystery in its all-consuming silence and darkness.
Had I not been the callow youth that I was then, I would have recognized how elegantly Beatty had executed a sort of, with no apology to North Sider Gertrude Stein, “Every-Yinzer’s Autobiography.”
In his authoritative And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry journalist John P. Hoerr acknowledges of Pittsburgh, “And, yes, noondays were often as dark as night — as awed visitors usually reported, when inversions trapped great clouds of smoke close to earth, and the downtown sidewalks were so thick with ferruginous dust from the open hearth and Bessemer furnaces, that they gave off a metallic sheen. Smoke seemed to seep out of the very pores of the mill buildings. Every morning housewives all over town put on babushkas and swept clouds of dust from their front porches.”
My mother still talks of days when a simple trolley ride into town necessitated afterward a full change of clothing. The grit in the air dirtied everything, clothing and skin. The ubiquitous Pittsburgh toilet, solitary and less-than-regal, is still stumbled on by unsuspecting house hunters, sometimes these commodes come accompanied by a skeletal shower, or more simply a utility sink, is commonplace with good reason. No homemaker wanted their couches and rugs despoiled by the cinders and ashes coughed out like cloudbursts with each footfall their spouse or children took through their tidy domain. Wash up in the basement and don’t track that shit in here!
As long as we’re getting granular about the air quality, here’s sportswriter Roy Blount Jr.’s take on it from his “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load”, a classic bit of embedded reporting among the Pittsburgh Steelers in their 1973 season (that’s one season shy of their first Super Bowl win), “People — including a good many in Pittsburgh — tend to look upon Pittsburgh as a Loser town. Perhaps it is the “Pitts” in the name, suggesting depression. Perhaps it is the immigrant millworker image of the population. Perhaps it is the fact that Pittsburgh has never been westerly enough to imply frontiersmen, easterly enough to imply sophisticates, or middle enough to imply stolid prosperity. Perhaps it is the fact that the Steelers went forty years without a championship of any kind. Perhaps it is the soot.”
Blount goes on, whether heroically or foolishly is up to the reader, to try his best at rendering the Yinzer accent, “That’s all people otta ton think of the Burgh as,” a local bartender told me: “Soot.”
Blount’s assessment of Pittsburgh’s national and self-image felt largely still in place over twenty years later in the mid-90’s. That underdog mentality; a habit of leaning maybe a little too hard on our sports teams for spiritual buoyancy; a certain depressiveness that can be attributed as much to the economic fall-out and population drain brought on by the collapse of the steel industry as to our yearly average, according to WPXI, of 203 overcast days; the geographic indeterminacy (are we mid-west?, mid-Atlantic?, northern Appalachia?); the pollution (the Clairton Coke Works continues to befoul our air despite the many penalties the EPA has levied against them).
Blount continues, “There is a dug-in, inveterate quality to life in Pittsburgh. By that I don’t mean a peaceful quality.” That sounds about right. Beatty’s poems are not peaceful paeans to gathering rosebuds in May. She gets the torpor of the city, she understands there is an underlying violence to this place.
Her poems bear witness to the physical violence of rape and assault, as well as to the institutional violence of the prison system. There is also the brutality of language itself. I’m thinking of the the Rolling Rock Man who says, “You look like you have AIDS, /you better go to the hospital, / you’re gonna die soon. “ and Beatty’s response to it, “I felt the evil wash over me / as I walked to my next table, stunned / by this backwash of words, this bold / sickness, this butcher world that’s in / and around us”.
In his essay “The Ecstasy of Jan Beatty”, published by Poetry Foundation in 2024, Ed Simon quotes the poet, “I love Pittsburgh, love the grit. I miss the steel miss the way the mills look, miss the fire.” Beatty also admits, “I resist being called a Pittsburgh poet. That sounds like a local poet, which I’m not.”
That ambivalence is baked into Beatty’s “Pittsburgh Poem”. The scene Beatty renders, the old woman herself, who is “taking care of something invisible, the listless air, / her life”, it’s handled with such tenderness. There’s a whiff of incense there, an almost churchiness, in the presentation of this old woman’s humble labors. There is also a distance. The woman “holds tight onto the good times” the same as “she holds tight / to her broom”. Can we hear judgment in that equivalence?
From my perspective in 1995, this all hits a little too close to home. Beatty is showed me the world I believe I knew in terms that I believe I understood. My own ambivalence regarding Pittsburgh was riding high in ’95. What I missed in my original reading of the poem, the syllables that would have floated unremarked past me, much the way ghost buses would do in the evenings going home from work, was the word “imagining”.
Recall the opening lines, “On Sarah Street on the South Side, / the old woman still stands with her broom, imagining”. Yes, this old woman is immutable. She “still stands”, and the poem implies that no matter when in time you are reading this poem that woman is still there on her stoop, broom in hand. She is a constant. A statue, a bit of civic art like the doughboy in Lawrenceville, or Dippy the Dinosaur outside the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
That word “imagining” is what sticks with me now. Beatty’s own description of this woman suggests an ordinary life, a mundane counting of days, a voluntary conscription into the middle-class values represented by her “green velour couch” and her “print housedress”.
And yet, “imagining”. From her own inner reserves of dreams and emotions she shapes the very air around her making it “full of lug and swish from the steelworker’s boot”. In 1995, I did not understand the pure necessity of “imagining” my city. That by my own fancy I could create, to nod toward the great East Liberty poet Jack Gilbert, a Pittsburgh greater than Pittsburgh.
I also think of the poet and novelist Richard Brautigan who, in his “Trout Fishing in America” wrote:
The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
I’d like to get it right.
Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
Imagine Pittsburgh.
A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
The Andrew Carnegie of trout!
Later Brautigan writes in ecstasy, “At last an opportunity to go trout fishing, to catch my first trout, to behold Pittsburgh.” And sure, there’s more than a soupçon of boho goofballery to what Brautigan is laying down. But also, wow, what a wonderful analogue trout fishing makes to the process of rendering one’s imagination upon the page. And Pittsburgh is there at its core.
John Berger writes, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” It was the relation between what I was looking at (Pittsburgh) from my cold perch outside the Music Building those years ago and myself that I was unable to see. Seeing would require an imagination larger and more generous than what I contained.
While Jan Beatty may understandably not want to be pigeon-holed as a “Pittsburgh poet”, she is one of aselect group of writers who has, on the page, shown readers a Pittsburgh not merely, as James Parton assayed, as “Hell with the lid taken off”, but as a forge of the very stuff of dreams. This city, which the archivist Martin Aurand avers “lies unevenly upon unruly land”, is Jack Gilbert’s “Tough Heaven” and it is Michael Chabon’s “Cloud Factory”. Here is Beatty’s opening to her later poem “Dropping Blotter Acid at the Slag Dump”,
In the field behind the shopping center,
at the slag dump on Rt. 51, down from Isaly’s,
us working class kids would hang.
We took our small bodies down
to watch the miraculous molten steel being dumped
from the railcars—there was nothing
like the exploding orange liquid against
the blue-black sky, nothing like the warm breeze
and smell of exhaust from passing cars. All our fathers were
steelworkers or factory workers and all we were
was bored-stoned, lying on our backs in the field
by the dump—but the night we dropped blotter,
it all jackknifed:
the steel sparked a firestorm of subatomic orange,
falling liquid stars over us, then oozing into new
rivers of running from my days,
from everyone—and then the breeze wasn’t air,
but a floating man, a tree let loose from
its moorings, a glittering fire.
The poet Donald Hall, who co-authored a book at least tangentially related to Pittsburgh and LSD, his “Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball” which relates the tale of the Pirates’ pitcher throwing a no-hitter while tripping his ass off (Hall also served as the fourteenth United States Poet Laureate but that’s much less interesting), observed, “For some poets, poetry derives from a place. Poem after poem reaches back and touches this place, and rehearses experiences connected with the place … But I am not thinking only of poetry which is geographic or descriptive. I am thinking of places which to the poets embody or recall a spiritual state.”
I believe Beatty’s work over the years is in tune with this. As she writes in her poem “Notes on a Nevada Flood”, “Wherever I am, I’m filled with sediment: / with tough, dirty Pittsburgh / where the mountains of black rock & / half mills are carapaces”. She also writes, “we were the mills, we were the fire”.
The ambivalence I mentioned earlier, Beatty’s in her “Pittsburgh Poem”, my own when I tried and failed to see myself and my city, is a reflection of an inner tension in the Pittsburgh writer; it’s the resultant pressure of trying to negotiate the twin poles of “Hell with the Lid Taken Off” and “Tough Heaven”, and this, I argue, is a spiritual state. The songwriter John K. samson put it like this, “And I love this place: the enormous sky / And the faces, hands that I’m haunted by / So why can’t I forgive these buildings / These frameworks labeled home”.
Maybe as poets born of Pittsburgh, we have no choice in the matter. Maybe we are always writing a poem about a steel mill. The steel mill is site where our souls congregate. And maybe, finally, to see this city is to see ourselves and that is what we are striving for because to truly see is ultimately to forgive.
