TPQ OnLine
review by Judy Meiksin
Pittsburghers Love Stories
MAD RIVER. Jan Beatty. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.
THE DOOR OPEN TO THE FIRE. Judith Vollmer. Cleveland: Cleveland State University, 1998.
Pittsburghers tell stories with the impassioned fire of steel mills and
rush of our rivers, metaphors throughout our lives. And saving friends is
an everyday event in Pittsburgh, from 100 strikers warming their hands over
a barrel (Vollmer) to a friend dying from AIDS (Beatty). In one poem, Vollmer takes us
back to a reckless time in the '70s at a disco in Northside "far from the
Castro or Key West" when youth strove to revel like the bacchantes in 500
B.C., doing poppers and grinding. Being "alert to their physical character"
does not save the speaker's friends from a string of lousy jobs, liquor,
and death. The speaker helplessly laments:
I could no more/escort them to a safe place
than I can read a topographical map
or cry without making sounds.
We were friends
and held the door open to the fire.
Just as furnace heat puts us in the face of the mills, the poets' boldness
can blister. In Beatty's poem addressing a mother, the speaker says:
And when your belly grew into
the body you never wanted, did you curse me,
try to cut me? Should I say you did your best,
a spare girl from a broken family, or should I say it straight --
you wanted it, you took it, like we all do.
And JV announces:
You can write about rivers all you want
but the truth is
most people here
have never even touched the water.
Still, Pittsburgh rivers touch Beatty with their dirty transparency, the flow,
the ungraspfulness of it:
Grabbing at Beauty...
...trying to see a trace of what he sees...
...he heard a song
and he spoke the words--I don't know
what he saw or heard...
...she stands on her concrete lawn,
taking care of something invisible
the listless air,
her life...
...I try to take
just one of your words and stretch it with a guess, expand
from the air...
...(cancerous lungs) where he keeps whatever it is he clutches at,
the unexpressed, dirty air...
...my speech will steam
out in the twelve languages of the uncertain...
...He'll let loose all the words
I've kept stuffed in these old stories --
he'll rage like a brown river flooding.
And here we have it, these old stories. Pittsburghers love 'em, from the
old sayings of our grandmothers,
Women hold up
three corners of the house (Vollmer),
to the tales of our fathers,
I try to see him,
a thin man in navy fatigues, fighting
in the Asian Pacific Theater Campaign,
this white-haired man in a blue cardigan,
bounding from troop carrier to beaches, embracing his rifle.
One medal says, "Freedom From Fear And Want" (Beatty).
Beatty, like a true Pittsburgher, can tell a story about anything, turning the
mundane --
I got one chili dog, I wanted two,
thought I'd get two
-- into something to think about as we learn that kissing the Greyhound bus driver
too many times is the price she paid for it. And like a true Pittsburgher,
Vollmer's school trips to Carnegie Museum chiseled sculptures in her mind as she
wonders,
Do statues really move at night?
They subtlely hone their presence in stories about the city (Vollmer):
the body
of Pittsburgh curved under snow,
sculpted finally into our dreams of it, whole,
the public domain of the universities & factories
met the sturdy chimneys & streets of our privacy.
If you want Pittsburgh, read Vollmer's My Sublimation, Ode to the Black Butterfly, and We Built This City. If you want to hear what
Pittsburghers hear, read Vollmer's My Mother's Wartime Jobs, 1943-45, and The Stoop Cleaner. My personal favorites are The Approach (Vollmer) and A
Waitress' Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don't Waste My
Time (Beatty).
Anyone who's been through Pittsburgh knows that when it rains (and rains
and rains) it pours: Beatty's chapbook Ravenous (State Street Press Chapbooks,1995) came off the press just weeks before Mad River, and Vollmer's chapbook Black Butterfly (Center for Book Arts Prize, 1997) was accepted for publication just weeks before The Door Open to the Fire. Expectantly, both chapbooks contain poems duplicated in their subsequent full-length
manuscripts, but in earlier versions. The chapbooks are a great treasure in
their own right, icons of history, poetry in the making, two Pittsburgh
poets definitely important to keep tabs on.
Copyright © 1998 by Judy Meiksin
Judy Meiksin is a Pittsburgh poet and playwright.
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