Write the poem you’re afraid to write. That’s the mantra-like advice Jan Beatty has been prescribing to budding poets of all stripes for over three decades, as the now-retired professor has seemingly had a guiding hand in the education of every writer in Pittsburgh.
By Fred Shaw
Dragstripping by Jan Beatty from the University of Pittsburgh Press
Write the poem you’re afraid to write. That’s the mantra-like advice Jan Beatty has been prescribing to budding poets of all stripes for over three decades, as the now-retired professor has seemingly had a guiding hand in the education of every writer in Pittsburgh. With her latest collection, Dragstripping (University of Pittsburgh Press, $18), it’s clear that Beatty has been heeding her own instruction as the work throughout remains consistently unafraid to confront the past or celebrate the people, music and moments that makes her sure-voiced speakers embody the insightful and edgy. So much so that Beatty’s leather-jacketed, pink eye-glassed visage was recently used in a billboard promoting the Andy Warhol Museum, with the large text beneath her photo reading like an ethos: poet. madwoman. ally.
Born to an unwed teen mother, Beatty’s first year was spent at the Rosalia Asylum in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, and it would take 32 years for her to learn her given name: Patrice Staiger. In an interview with AGNI, Beatty shares that “This not knowing, this walking around the world not looking like anyone, wondering where it all started—that has everything to do with my poetry, with who I am. It took me a lot of years to realize that, to acknowledge that not knowing who I am is a big fucking deal.” This search for the stability of identity many take for granted is but one of her poem’s potent strands, with her writing making good use of both the lyrical and the narrative. This fresh and engaging hybrid form is one she keeps evolving, most recently employed in her prize-winning memoir, American Bastard.
It’s displayed early on in Dragstripping as she writes in “The Body’s River,” “I was born for betrayal—/ When my mother left me in the orphanage, // I invented love with strangers./ And if it wasn’t there, I made it be there,// until the crash, the revelation./ The say the blues is three chords and the truth—// And poetry is long-lined lies and a deep dive/ into the body’s costly river.” The poem, full of sturdy musicality, speaks of the flesh and to the flesh. Though it took Beatty time to make these connections, she acknowledges “there’s a lot at stake in not going back through the trauma of orphanage and adoption. My poems include a wide view of place and a lot of moving around the world.” When she mentions she used to frequently travel by train across Canada before finding out that her biological father was three-time Stanley Cup champion hockey player for the Toronto Maple Leafs it’s almost chilling. “It was my body that took me there, not any conscious knowledge.”
A more conscious choice for Beatty is the continued inclusion of poems concerning her adopted father, Robert T. Beatty. According to the poet, the former WWII Seabee “saved my life… I think each person needs at least one person who sees them, who they can count on in this life. If you don’t have that, you’re in trouble. He was that for me. My adoptive father was kind-hearted but tough. He was a steelworker for J&L, Union #127. He punched out his foreman at the mill and lost his job. He bought me books to read and told the best jokes. When he was dying, we went to cancer treatments together. He died in 1986. I don’t think I would have survived without him, as the adopted kid who was terrified of everything, especially my adopted mother and sister. When he was sick, he made a rug for me with the initial “J” on it. He said, ‘Put this by your bed, and the first thing you feel will be soft.’”
In her previous collections, it was poems like “T-Shirts” and “My Father Teaches Me to Dream” that characterized him as being both authentic and foundational for the speaker. In “My Father’s Bandages” he’s revealed in a yellowed photo as “covered in bandages./ He’s looking straight into the camera,/ a cigarette to his mouth, a half fuck you// half smile, the jungle of Papua, New Guinea/ behind him” With the photo acting as a kind of time machine, the speaker considers the distance life can take a person, asking “What was he thinking?/ Now when I look at him,/ there’s a river of light around him./ What breaks my heart may be/ the same thing that breaks yours—/ or not.” When asked about the father’s appearance through multiple collections, Beatty replies with the humanity expected of the art form that for some, has become more an academic exercise than an effort to connect. “People respond to these poems, and I think it’s because the love that he gave was unstoppable, and it still runs deep.”
With Dragstripping dedicated to the late Ed Ochester, a longtime director of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and “unparalleled” editor for the Pitt Poetry Series who championed Beatty from the beginning, it seemed important to ask her about his role as mentor in helping to develop Beatty’s writing. After sharing a story of Ochester coming to find her at the restaurant where Beatty was waitressing after a disastrous poetry workshop session, she shares that “as a teacher, Ed gave us room to move, room to try different things. He had a wide berth for critique, but he called out poems that were indecipherable, opaque, or pretentious. He was brilliant in his study and knowledge, yet he never used that knowledge to criticize. He had a great sense of humor. Ed’s appreciation of the “real” in a poem was a guide for me and a permission to tell true stories. I was grateful for the room that he gave us in the classroom and in our poems”
Perhaps, the “real” was what Ochester saw early on in Beatty whose writing can feel more like a controlled burn than a wildfire, a seething under the surface rather than the emotional outpouring in other’s work that can feel akin to reality TV. In “Miraculous,” it gets stripped bare. “As a child I spent I spent a lot of time in the closet. I sat, bent like a finger in arthritis./ Here I could become anything: a cloud, a C note, Michael Jackson’s rhinestone hand./ By the time my mother would finally unlock the door to say, ‘Had Enough?’/ I was able to imagine her as someone miraculous, someone saving me/ from my mother.” The poem, with its powerful similes and imagistic listing hinges on Beatty’s use of voice. That she’ll invoke two Rust Belt poets in a question about voice as a poetic concept is revealing but not surprising as the native Pittsburgher is prone to not pulling any punches.
When Beatty states, “I come from the tradition of James Wright, who said, ‘All I can do is speak in a flat voice’” readers should consider it genuine. When she mentions her friend and fellow Pittsburgh poet Judith Vollmer once telling her, “Have the courage to say things plainly,” think of how the best writing comes from the earned experience of being alive. For Beatty, growing up in a blue-collar household where a career in writing “was for other people, people who had money,” though she had been writing poems since first grade. A child of the ‘60’s with a degree in social work in hand she worked in welfare offices and abortion clinics, later becoming a waitress for fifteen years. “All of this goes towards developing a life, a voice—but I needed to learn the craft of writing. I took one class at a time at night, even though I couldn’t pay for it”
Influenced by the likes of heavy hitters like Etheridge Knight, Wanda Coleman, D.A. Powell, and Ai, Beatty’s speakers come off as both knowing and vulnerable in poems like “Junkie” and “Spoonful,” where addiction gets considered through the lens of a bliss that’s never worth its ultimate costs. In “Green Comets of Future,” the reader is dropped into a scene: “Down County Road 18 outside of Stow,/ my head flying the room of strangers./ I was fifteen & doing peyote in some guy’s trailer,/ buttons of weed, young enough I was…” The poem continues in a harrowing and hallucinogenic way, the speaker’s thoughts racing from past to future as if “birds were flying around inside me—/ in circles, white,” the only real things, “the hills & factories of Pittsburgh.”
If poems like these and others sprinkled throughout previous collections seem “authentic” then they’ve achieved what Beatty was after. When pressed about engaging in a topic like this, she answers that “the last thing I want to do is romanticize addiction, but, at the same time, I’m an addict—which means I can’t be trusted. So, one way to handle this is to indict the speaker of the poem, which I often do… Or, I can present collisions of desire, hunger, seduction, incredible fuck-up-ed-ness, manipulation, devastation, all the emotional and psychic bankruptcy involved—and find a poem.” It’s a gutsy way of survival and showing respect toward a mental illness that even in the midst of the long-running opioid crisis can still be misunderstood.
With a love of muscle cars that shows up in Dragstripping, Beatty’s use of the word “collision” feels spot-on, calling to mind the different ways car imagery pops up throughout the collection, often used as a metaphor to emphasize or exaggerate some emotion. In a favorite, “Lowrider,” Beatty writes, “Anthony was a lowrider, silver fire running/ up his leg. We 3rd graders flamed as the nuns/ came running in their black orthopedic shoes:/ Where’s Anthony?” What follows is a narrative of institutional bullying as Anthony comes “scraping/ down the tiled hall. Heard him dragging limp/ in the silver brace that ran outside his pant leg,/ around his heavy black shoe and up/ to his knee.” Yet as soon as reader’s are immersed in the cruelty of the nuns, the poem pivots to something wilder as the focus moves away from Anthony and turns the children into a collective, “glimmering” and “metallic…they couldn’t even see our engines,/ 450’s with a dirty hum as we glided/ past, leaving them/ in their wrecked house of religion.”
Ever the iconoclast, Beatty remarks that the collection’s title is a nod toward “the stripping away of so many things: losses, friendships, ways of being. It’s the stripping life down to what we think is needed.” This playfulness with language threatens to overwhelm the collection’s title poem where the speaker “met a stripper on my first visit to the big West…//she was boy and I hadn’t met anyone like her yet…//I wanted to be her./ I couldn’t even say what she had,/ but I wanted it.” The sense of desire and where it should be placed is palpable throughout the poem as the speaker embraces “myself a queen those days,/ inside I felt the turning diamonds/ of a life not lived/ someone else’s life,/ now mine: holding the vision, heavy as mud” The vision is a realization that can take time to develop or embrace, much like the writing of the poem itself, something that took place over years. Beatty also wants to be clear that “I didn’t want to capitalize in any way on the content of gender fluidity. trans bodies, the burden of gender, etc. I didn’t want any easy or simplistic road to elation.”
While sexuality and drugs have their place in Beatty’s work, the third leg of that hedonistic triumvirate, rock ‘n roll, gets ample play as lyrics become epigraph or used as an entry point to understand something about speaker’s inner life. In “Sanctified,” she pays tribute to the Godmother of rock ‘n roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe in an epistolary written “50 years too late.” Watching from the distance of time, the speaker embraces “your high-/heeled guitar playing, the way the said you railed/ your white Les Paul Custom like a tommy gun:/ gospel-wild and showing the men how its done.” The poem’s hard-edged sounds mirroring the realism of the blues and its bearing “no happy endings.”
When Beatty shares “the book was originally titled, Blues Shouters, which called out to the original Blues Shouters like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Howlin’ Wolf, who let loose their voices with a fervor and intensity, and who influenced some early British rockers like Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck. Blues Shouters also referred to the voices of unknown women, the voices of marginalized women who are not heard or who cannot speak.” And while this final statement remains sadly true, Dragstripping is a book looking to settle that score.
Fred Shaw is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA. He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University. His first collection. Scraping Away, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. A book reviewer and Poetry Editor for Pittsburgh Quarterly, his poem, “Argot,” is featured in the 2018 full-length documentary, Eating & Working & Eating & Working. The film focuses on the lives of local service-industry workers. His poem “Scraping Away” was selected for the PA Public Poetry Project in 2017. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and rescued hound dog.
