This essay is the first in a series for National Poetry Month on Pittsburgh’s literary history and the role of poetry in public published in conjunction with the International Poetry Forum.
April 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month. It also marks the 60th anniversary of the public announcement of the International Poetry Forum, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit reading series that launched with a visit from Archibald MacLeish on October 19, 1966. In honor of this convergence, we have compiled ten reading recommendations by alumni of the International Poetry Forum to read this month.
1. Seamus Heaney, The Poems of Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)
Seamus Heaney visited Pittsburgh’s International Poetry Forum five times between 1974 and 2004. His debut collection, Death of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber, 1966), remains a go-to recommendation for newcomers to poetry. It does the impossible thing of being both infinitely simple and infinitely complex: the poems are approachable upon first read but are never exhausted by rereading. The recent edition of his complete poems is what I might gift to extraterrestrial life on first contact—I can’t think of much that would put a better foot forward for humanity.
2. Mary Oliver, American Primitive (Little, Brown, 1983)
Everyone loves Mary Oliver, and everyone’s not wrong. Oliver visited the International Poetry Forum in 1979—well before she became world-famous—alongside Howard Moss, longtime poetry editor of The New Yorker and winner of the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. Oliver’s Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Penguin, 2017) is what I see on most bookshelves, but American Primitive (her Pulitzer winner) is possibly her best single collection.
3. Lucille Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012)
Another early-career performer in our Pittsburgh-based reading series was Lucille Clifton. Clifton offered one of her first major readings at Carnegie Lecture Hall in 1971, returning twenty years later alongside Charles Causley to receive the Forum’s Charity Randall Citation, an award that honored poets dedicated to poetry as a spoken art. Clifton’s complete range is on display in this marvelous collection from BOA Editions.
4. Larry Levis, Winter Stars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026)
If you’ve never heard of Larry Levis, there’s a decent chance he’s your favorite poet’s favorite poet. His debut collection, Wrecking Crew (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), was chosen for publication in Pitt Poetry Series in conjunction with the International Poetry Forum’s (now defunct) United States Award, a first-book prize juried between 1967–1976 by poet-judges including Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and May Swenson. Pitt’s recent reissue of Winter Stars (2026) is an ideal introduction to Levis’s work.
5. Jorge Luis Borges, Poems of the Night (Penguin Classics, 2010)
Borges’s Anglophone home may well be Pittsburgh. The Borges Center, previously based in Denmark and then Iowa, has been a fixture at the University of Pittsburgh for almost twenty years. During his 1968 visit to Pittsburgh, Borges read his poems in Spanish and offered commentary in English, speaking of his love of philosophy and his sense of kinship with Anglophone poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Frost, and (especially) W.B. Yeats. When interviewed about his thoughts of Pittsburgh, he simply quipped, “I think the reading went swimmingly”—high praise from Borges.
6. Tomas Tranströmer, Windows & Stones (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), translated from the Swedish by May Swenson with Leif Sjöberg
Tranströmer and Swenson visited the Forum twice each. This book was an “International Poetry Forum Selection” from Pitt Poetry Series in 1972, one of two such collections (alongside Odysseus Elytis’ 1974 The Axion Esti) that Pitt and the Forum published in advance of a Nobel Prize (1979 for Elytis, 2011 for Tranströmer).
7. W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (Random House, 1947)
A classic by a classic. Auden was one of the primary inspirations when our reading series launched in 1966. He visited the International Poetry Forum in 1969 to read his work with accompaniment of visual art from artist Matsubara Naoko, a Japanese-Canadian printmaker who studied at Carnegie Mellon.
8. Samuel Hazo, The Song of the Horse (Autumn House Press, 2008)
Samuel Hazo, founder of the International Poetry Forum, is still actively publishing and performing at 97. He’s also scheduled to receive an honorary doctorate—his 13th—from Carnegie Mellon University this spring. Hazo’s early translation of Ali Ahmad Said Esber, The Blood of Adonis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), brought one of the century’s most famous Arabic poets to a broad American audience; his Once for the Last Bandit (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. A personal favorite is Hazo’s The Song of the Horse, a fifty-year selection from Autumn House Press, the local indie publisher named best in the country by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs last year.
9. Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986)
Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, making her the second African American to win the prize, after Gwendolyn Brooks (who performed here with Haki R. Madhubuti in 1968 and Etta Cox in 1983). During her speech for the 2023 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Dove thanked Carnegie Mellon for publishing her first three books—and for sending her off with a blessing “when W.W. Norton came calling.” Dove is scheduled to visit the International Poetry Forum this coming April 18 at Carnegie Lecture Hall.
10. Fred Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Poetry of Mister Rogers (Quirk Books, 2019)
Finally, my three-year-old would never forgive me (and I may not forgive myself) if I excluded Fred Rogers from this list. Rogers, a poet in practice and philosophy, was an early participant in “Poets in Person,” the International Poetry Forum’s poets-in-the-schools program. Several figures from the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood universe have performed in our reading series over the years, including Joe Negri (“Handyman Negri”) and Maggie Stewart (“Mayor Maggie”).
You can follow the International Poetry Forum’s social media channels for more reading recommendations over National Poetry Month.
