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“How are things in Pittsburgh?,” an out-of-town friend might ask.
If you don’t want to talk weather, or our latest pro-sports let-down, you might prefer to ship said friend two new books that answer that question in deeply engaged fashion.
“The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain” (Main Street Rag) is an ambitious anthology edited by Doralee Brooks and featuring 140 poems, all either about or set in Pittsburgh, by 90 living poets. And the forthcoming “Pittsburgh in 50 Maps” (Belt Publishing) is geography professor Stentor Danielson’s compendium of original maps, each overlaying our familiar swath of turf where the three rivers meet with different demographic, historical or cultural data.
In “Gulf Tower,” fans of locally sourced verse will find some familiar names, from Jan Beatty and Lori Jakiela to Cameron Barnett and Michael Simms. But if you view the book as a portrait of Pittsburgh in verse, what’s more important is the ground the poems cover.
Sure, there’s a Kennywood poem, another with “jagoff” in the title, and one inspired by a Teenie Harris photo. And in that peculiarly valedictory Pittsburgh way, there are plenty of “things that aren’t there anymore,” as in Kristofer Collins’ “The Photograph of Jay Dantry at the Entrance to Jay’s Bookstall”: “You were alive. We were all so very much alive. The city / was gray and dull and filled with ugly snow, but our breath / in the air was proof we were, in fact, here.”
You can’t distill 140 poems into one pure tincture, but what I found most affecting in “Gulf Tower” was its evocation of psychogeography — that sense of how we connect emotions with physical places.
Highlights include Beatty’s “Dropping Blotter Acid at the Slag Dump”: “We took our small bodies down / to watch the miraculous molten steel being dumps / from the railcars — there was nothing / like the exploding organ liquid against / the blue-black sky, nothing like the warm breeze / and smell of exhaust from passing cars.”
And while some of the stories told in these poems could have happened anywhere, they didn’t. A city’s landmarks can themselves be a comfort, as in Romella Kitchens’ “Twisters: Never Letting Go”: “My heart beating quickly in a new environment, many of the / people seemingly not like me, I went exploring one evening / near the Bloomfield Bridge because at least when I saw that bridge — / I wasn’t alone.”
Perhaps inevitably, “Gulf Tower” includes more recollections of the city’s sooty industrial past than evocations of its fluorescent-lit eds-and-meds present.
But overall, Brooks, who is City of Asylum’s current Poet Laureate for Allegheny County, has captured a fair cross-section of the varieties of experience one mid-sized Appalachian burg can provide: love, loss, friendship, memory, gratitude. A Feb. 16 book launch at Alphabet City even included tributes to such iconic deceased Pittsburgh poets as Ed Ochester, Jack Gilbert, Gertrude Stein and Gerald Stern (some of whom were born here and left, while others came and stayed).
Just as poems can be factual as well as feeling, so can maps be lyrical as well as data-driven.
Danielson’s “50 Maps” boasts 125 pages of handsome full-color maps and thoughtful explanatory text. It includes a fine example of our municipality’s storied topographical wackiness in the City of Hills map, which shows that our highest and lowest points — Brashear Reservoir, in Observatory Hill, and the Ohio’s bank downstream of Brunot Island, respectively — are less than two miles apart as the crow flies … but that neither is very near the city’s steepest street (Canton Avenue, in Beechview).
There’s also lots of history, including a primer on the Native American presence here, a rundown of our mythical “fourth river,” and an illustration of how rapidly Pittsburgh’s acreage grew through the annexation of surrounding municipalities in the four decades after the Civil War.
And the book is virtually up-to-the-minute with its maps visualizing gentrification, race and ethnicity, immigrant populations and social justice issues like food deserts, lead paint contamination and high local asthma rates. (The latter, it might surprise you to learn, are not limited to the Mon Valley.)
“Gulf Tower” and “50 Maps” are scarcely the first books to try to capture the city’s essence, from Stefan Lorant’s landmark “Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City” to last year’s fine Ed Simon essay collection “The Soul of Pittsburgh.”
But of course, no book on the subject can be definitive. We’re not the biggest city around, but there are still too many Pittsburghs to choose from.
