This essay is the second 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.
On September 26, 1979, playwright Tennessee Williams visited Pittsburgh to offer a poetry reading at Carnegie Music Hall. The event sold out; nearly 2,000 people filled the Oakland venue. Within a week of Williams’ visit, the local papers ran at least five reviews and recaps of the evening, with some providing radically different interpretations of the performance.
One Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviewer (Sept. 27) wrote that the author of A Streetcar Named Desire was as capable a poet as a playwright: Williams “seemed as much at home on the bare stage of the music hall as if he had invited us all in for a julep. In a way he did.” Another attendee, also in the Post-Gazette (Oct. 4), shot back that Williams “actually bombed on stage,” accusing the previous reviewer of simply being starstruck (and with fighting words, at that: the letter to the editor ends with the reprimanding “don’t cover us with treacle”).
From the perspective of literary history, Williams’ Pittsburgh appearance—and the subsequent newspaper reviews it generated—are unusual for several reasons. First, of course, they mark the (relatively) rare occasion of a celebration of Williams’ poetic talent. While Williams’ legacy is incontestably tied to the stage, his collections In the Winter of Cities (1956) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977) both hold up (and both have Pittsburgh connections via their publisher, New Direction’s James Laughlin, who Williams publicly thanked during his reading).
What is truly remarkable about this scenario, however, is not that Williams should present poetry, or that editorialists should battle over the arts, but that a poetry reading should be reviewed at all. As it happens, the sub-genre of the poetry reading review is one of the rarest in American history, and one that Pittsburgh may well claim to have invented.
On May 7, 1993, U.S. Poet Laureate Mona Van Duyn presented an analysis of poetry publication trends in the 20th century as a portion of her valedictory address at the Library of Congress. Her address, which was motivated in part as a qualification of Dana Gioia’s famous essay “Can Poetry Matter?” from 1991, was essentially an attempt to spotlight poetry’s hidden-in-plain-sight popularity through reading and publication statistics.
One of Van Duyn’s areas of pessimism was the newspaper. Reviews of poetry books were—then as ever—fighting for print coverage. But even worse, reviews of poetry readings were a completely foreign concept. According to Van Duyn’s analysis, “[U.S. newspapers] have never sent a reviewer to a poetry reading, no matter how prestigious the performer — with the exception of Pittsburgh, where a reading is reviewed the next morning by two newspapers.”
Pittsburgh’s unusual tradition of poetry reviews dates back to October 19, 1966, with Archbald MacLeish’s visit as the inaugural performer of the International Poetry Forum( a nonprofit reading series that I now direct). MacLeish’s visit filled the 600-person Carnegie Lecture Hall, and even (per the dramatic review published in the Post-Gazette the following morning) left “more than 100… in the rain-soaked darkness” outside. Three additional articles that reviewed or referenced the event followed in the New Pittsburgh Courier (Oct. 22) and the (now defunct) Pittsburgh Press (Oct. 24 and 28). Over the 365 days that followed the launch event, the phrase “International Poetry Forum” appeared in local and national newspapers at least 159 times (this is per the archives of newspapers.com, which counts over 6,000 matches of the phrase to date, including advertisements, references, and full reviews.)
Reviews of the International Poetry Forum’s 400+ performances in Pittsburgh—which included figures like Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Kurt Vonnegut, James Earl Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Gregory Peck, Lynn Swann, Princess Grace of Monaco, Queen Noor of Jordan, and hundreds more—continued at a steady rate for 43 years, until the retirement of Forum founder Samuel Hazo in 2009. The sum of articles, which spanned regular reviewers (including Donald Miller and Bob Hoover of the Post-Gazette) and one-time editorialists across multiple publications, likely constitute the most sustained tradition of its kind in the country.
Such a superlative is difficult to prove definitively (if another such tradition does exist, do please reach out—I am actively searching). In any case, this strange claim to fame is a signal of the historically outsized tradition of poetry readings in the midsize Pittsburgh, which Publishers Weekly recently dubbed a “city built on poetry,” and U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand once called the “most exciting” place to read in the country.
To emphasize Pittsburgh’s unique literary culture, consider that the International Poetry Forum is just one of many poetry reading series in the city. The Forum is in good company here with Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, City of Asylum, Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, Hemingway’s Poetry Series, White Whale Bookstore’s poetry events, Stay Gold Books’ poetry events, Bonfire Reading Series, Pittsburgh Poetry Collective, Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, Nebby Poetry Society, Speakeasy, Greenhouse Poetry Series, Oddmonth Poetry Series, PGH Book Fest, Scribble House Book Fest, The Poetry Atelier in The Space Upstairs, Poetry Lounge, Madwomen in the Attic, Appalachian Writers Series, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics—not to mention the reading series of local MFA programs, English departments (graduate and undergraduate), and other libraries, cultural institutions, communities groups, bookstores, and literary organizations in town.
When the International Poetry Forum’s founder asked me to relaunch the nonprofit’s reading series in 2023, I spent hours combing through hundreds of these poetry reviews online. When I first encountered 1979 letter to the editor bashing the quality of Tennessee Williams’ performance, I felt a moment of anxiety—would our future readings be subject to this degree of scrutiny? Almost immediately, however, I realized that this scrutiny was a good thing, and a precious part of Pittsburgh’s cultural heritage. Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, “There is only one thing in life worse than [poetry] being talked about, and that is [poetry] not being talked about.”
Van Duyn’s exact language is doubly important: “with the exception of Pittsburgh, where a reading is reviewed the next morning by two newspapers.” Had each event generated a single review, that alone would have been significant. But the fact that many poetry events generated multiple reviews (not to mention the equally strong output of poetry book reviews) means that Pittsburgh is possibly the only city U.S. history that has ever made the newspaper an expected platform for the public reflection of—and occasional debate over—poetry and the poet’s role in society.
The 2024 relaunch of the International Poetry Forum received broad coverage in the local papers and magazines. Now that the nonprofit’s operations are back up to scale, we hope to see the revival of poetry reading reviews in Pittsburgh, both for the Forum and our many peer reading series. Unfortunately, the challenges are many: the Post-Gazette, which has very probably published more poetry reading reviews than any periodical in the country, is slated to close on May 3. But many other efforts, including the rising Pittsburgh Review of Books, are well-positioned to revive this tradition.
If you have the opportunity to read through some of these reviews, they’re an incredible glimpse into all aspects of Pittsburgh’s history. Some are hilarious; some are deeply unsettling. Gwendolyn Brook’s first visit to the Forum—with Haki R. Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee) in 1968—saw a heckler ejected from Carnegie Lecture Hall. In 1970, John Berryman, nearing the end of his life, performed from a chair with a bandaged foot after stamping out a cigarette-wastebin fire the night before. In 1987 (as I discussed a few years back in a piece for Postindustrial), one attendee asserted that the Forum’s lineup of readings had “deteriorated” from the early days of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, complaining of a season roster that included a young Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Czesław Miłosz.
But for the most part, the reviews are brilliant. Coming from authors of all walks of life, they take poetry as seriously and unpretentiously as one could hope. Consistent across the best of these is the implicit assumption that poetry belongs in the public sphere, and that the literary arts deserve not only scholarly, but also strong civic and editorial engagement.
