King Cool: Ed Ochester and The Pittsburgh School of Poetry

By Kristofer Collins 

Only a handful of Saturdays ago I found myself in the awkward and somewhat surreal position of being at a crowded party and having to squeeze through a narrow gap between a former U.S. Poet Laureate and a recent winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, each of whom was busily conversing with other famous poets, or at least famous to those of us who follow the antics of verse-slingers, and happily partaking of the various table-length spreads of hors d’oeuvres straddling the edges of the outdoor courtyard at artist James Simon’s Uptown studio.

It was a warm September evening and the place was brimming with a joie de vivre that was almost post-coital. This was the afterparty to the two-day A Celebration of Ed Ochester event hosted by the poets Nancy Krygowski, Terrance Hayes, and Jeffrey McDaniel, the trio tasked with the responsibility of shepherding the world-renowned Pitt Poetry Series after Ochester’s retirement from his position as the editor in 2021.

Ed, who was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1939 and raised in Queens, began teaching at the University of Pittsburgh in 1970. Beginning in 1978 he ran the Pitt Poetry Series published by the University of Pittsburgh Press for nearly forty years, as well as serving as director of the Pitt Writing Department for almost twenty years. He died in August of 2023 leaving behind him an incredible legacy as a poet, a teacher, and an editor.

This gathering of tipsy, whooping writers was a testament to Ed Ochester’s importance in the halls and back alleys of literature. The last forty-eight hours consisted of a choice (which in this instance is best pronounced in the red-blooded spirit of Spencer Tracy complimenting the long thin loveliness of Katharine Hepburn cherce), smorgasbord of readings and panel discussions featuring Hayes as well as other luminaries like Billy Collins, Ross Gay, Denise Duhamel, Toi Derricotte, Jan Beatty, Aaron Smith, and Lynn Emanuel.

The party was meant to cap a tightly packed two days of literary high-mindedness with a let-your-hair-down hang-out with the organizers, the marquee guests, and a core sample of the Pittsburgh writing community, the highlight of which would be a reading from Ochester’s selected works by some of the gathered practitioners of the art of poesy.

One writer intimately connected to Pittsburgh not present at the soiree was novelist Michael Chabon. A former student of Ochester’s, Chabon penned a warm appreciation of Ed for The New York Review of Books in 2013. Chabon recalled, “In class, Ed always used to start by reading to us, his voice roughened by a Queens accent and the unfiltered Pall Malls he smoked, his straight hair falling from his big square brow down across his big square glasses. With his Auden haircut and his flannel shirts and blue jeans, Ed looked the way that I thought a poet ought to look, at the time; blue-collar but intellectual, like an old-school folksinger, or a man who was sent by the union to organize lumberjacks.”

It’s reminiscent of Ochester’s description of another nondescript artist from his poem “Fred Astaire”, “The secret of his popularity was / that he looked like a bus driver / who could dance.” Ed sure could  dance, too. Although I never witnessed him break into a soft shoe routine, he certainly made words glide and whirl across the page, lighting boogie-woogie fires under his plainspoken language.

He was a great believer in the democratization of the art of poetry. His own work does more than blur the line separating the high and low in art, it obliterates it. “A friend of mine said years ago / “a really good poem sure / gets the snot flowing” and / for anyone who has a heart anymore / that says almost as much about it as Frost or Pound ever said,” he offers as raison d’être in “Writer’s Colony.”

Ochester’s work embraced a vast universe of references. Taken together Ed’s collected poems are like a Gordian Knot made from the licorice shoelaces devoured by Charlie Chaplin’s tramp in The Gold Rush. Here Derrida and Voltaire jitterbug to the Bonzo Dog Band while on a screen behind them play the films of George Romero, Ornette Coleman splashes around in Monet’s Water Lilies, classical pianist Mitsuko Uchida sits in with Dr. Zoot & the Suits as ancient Greek poets stride across the Appalachians, and Mother Theresa commandeers the spotlight for a solo turn at singing “Love for Sale.”

While The Rose of Calcutta didn’t show up on the playlist wafting from the speakers in James Simon’s courtyard, Ed’s beloved Neil Young did, his high tenor tangled in the cloud of marijuana smoke lazily hovering over a corner occupied by a claque of younger writers, coolers filled with beer, and a rather dank-looking in-ground hot tub. As Billy Collins scanned the boxed wine on offer he was heard to say, “I’m in the ABC club—Anything But Chardonnay.”

The reading got underway, each poet taking their place under the strings of twinkle lights and towering bamboo stalks, giggling through a personal anecdote about Ochester, and reading one or two of their favorite Ed poems. Jan Beatty, Ross Gay, Denise Duhamel, Terrance Hayes, Billy Collins. Each of them incredibly distinct, unmistakably themselves, and yet here they were, as a group, conjuring Ochester’s own voice, at once gruff and affable, jokey and wise.

It was fitting that Nancy Krygowski chose to start things off with Ochester’s “On Frank O’Hara’s Birthday, Key West.” O’Hara was a touchstone for Ed. Once, in a particularly long and typically discursive poem, O’Hara stopped everything to declare, “YIPPEE! I’m glad I’m alive,” and here, in Ed’s poem for Frank, Krygowski read these lines:

but I’m in my usual Key West Glow
and loving the silliness, the tourists
at Hemingway’s house photographing
the descendants of his cats.
Whenever I float in the chop
off Fort Taylor I think maybe
I’m among H2O molecules Hemingway
or Elizabeth Bishop touched here
or O’Hara waded through off Fire Island,
perhaps not.

Later in the poem Ed summons the indefatigable spirit of O’Hara in this very, very Frank sentiment, although I’m fairly certain O’Hara considered Hemingway an obnoxious bore,

I’m glad Hemingway punched Wallace Stevens
here, thus minimizing the idea of order
at Key West, and God bless the tourists
walking up and down Duval,
all they want is pleasure and some memories,
all they want is permanence and
they won’t find it, though luckily
when the sun sets behind the La Concha
and the tourists applaud it and
lift their glasses in toast
the sun will come back again.

In his essay Michael Chabon recalled Ed reading quite a few poems by Frank O’Hara to his class. Chabon wrote, “The voice of O’Hara was the voice of a friend, a best friend. It was intimate and casual. And yet at the same time it was also refined, literary, erudite, capable of hopping like a sparrow down a sidewalk from densely imagistic to dishy and familiar in the space of a single line.” That’s a pretty good summation of Ed’s voice, too, as it was summoned by this varied crew of old friends, colleagues, and students.

Sitting there in that lively atmosphere, surrounded by writers I’ve long admired, drinking in the conviviality along with a few cans of amber, listening as Nancy gave voice to Ochester, who in turn was summoning the giddy ghost of Frank O’Hara, I could see a through-line clear as day. It was a genealogy writ in the primary glow of the twinkle lights that snaked from the original New York School of Poets of the post-war period, bending and slithering westward with the former New Yorker Ed Ochester, who in turn, through his own writing and teaching, imparted that spirit to Pittsburgh as was now being embodied by Krygowski. Did these writers here, then, via deep lineage constitute a Pittsburgh School of Poetry?

First let’s define our terms. Known variously as The School of New York Poets or The New York School of Poets, and which is sometimes referred to reductively as The New York School of Poetry, the core writers who are usually lumped into this category are Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest. And just to be clear, there was no school in New York City which all of these poets attended, nor did they as a group endeavor to create an institution of higher learning with the intent of disseminating their particular literary aesthetic. Instead, the moniker was an astute bit of public relations invented by the art gallery owner and publisher John Bernard Myers.

In his study “The Last Avant-Garde,” author David Lehman writes, “John Bernard Myers, the flamboyant director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, came up with the New York School moniker in 1961, hoping to cash in on the cachet of the world-conquering Abstract Expressionists. “The idea was that, since everybody was talking about the New York School of painting, if he created a New York School of poets then they would automatically be considered important,” Ashbery commented without enthusiasm.”

So, we’re already on shaky ground. The whole” New York School” thing was a bit of slick advertising, not an intentional artistic movement. However, the writers so-labeled did have some very important things in common. They rejected academic formalism in favor of the freedom of expression demonstrated by the artists they socialized with such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, they refused to recognize any line separating high art from popular culture, they relished collaboration with other writers as well as visual artists and musicians, and they made humor a cornerstone of their work.

If we take these as the primary identifying features of a particular school of poetics, exemplified by the work of Frank O’Hara, then can we not look to Ed Ochester as the epitome of what from here on I will call The Pittsburgh School of Poetry? Sure, why not!

If the above are the hallmarks of O’Hara’s New York School, then what can we say are the tenets of Ochester’s Pittsburgh School? There are certain shared aspects. Both schools value intelligence, wit, and, I think above all else, friendship. Ochester’s poems, much like O’Hara’s, are stuffed full of people’s names. Friends, colleagues, family, historical figures, brilliant musicians, and some real schnorrers all show up in poem after poem. His poem “Poetry” alone name checks eight other poets, most of whom were personally connected to Ed.

This practice goes well beyond the poems indulging in the mere identifying of or paying homage to beloved and admired persons as a kind of passive acknowledgement. This is poetry engaged in enacting a community. Ed is intentionally welding together the common bonds between the people who appear in his poems with each other, yes, but also by extension, and this is where the conversational tone of Ed’s poems works a bit of sneaky magic, Ed’s intimate voice implicates the reader as a valued and ultimately necessary member of this same community.

It’s reminiscent of something Holden Caulfield says in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much.” Except for the fact that with Ed it did happen. Quite a bit actually as noted by the many speakers at the weekend celebration. The intimacy of Ochester’s voice on the page mirrored the experience of simply talking one on one with him. We can see this chumminess in the work of local poets like Lori Jakiela, Toi Derricotte, and Jan Beatty to name a few who have pointed to Ed’s influence as important to their own writing.

Where does the Pittsburgh School of Poetry diverge from its New York antecedent? Let’s start with the Pittsburgh School’s utter lack of bullshit, both philosophical and aesthetic. Where the New York writers were under the sway of French Surrealist writers like Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Raymond Roussel, Pittsburgh School poets share more commonality with William Carlos Williams, Raymond Carver, and the vernacular experiments of Gertrude Stein. In terms of the work of Frank O’Hara, who also admired Williams, this means the Pittsburgh School is less likely to produce expansive, associative poems such as “Memorial Day 1950” and “Ode to Michael Goldberg(‘s Birth and Other Births)” than his I-do-this-I do-that poems like “Personal Poem” and “The Day Lady Died.”

O’Hara’s widescreen creations were rooted in his associations with the New York artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The art critic Harold Rosenberg, in his groundbreaking essay “The American Action Painters,”      wrote “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act rather than as a space in which to reproduce…. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” The blank page, then, becomes a canvas for the poet and the poem that results is both subject and object of the event.

Returning for a moment to Michael Chabon’s essay. He distills Ochester’s poetic values to this solid, irrefutable core, “(Ed) emphasized accuracy and precision in language, the sadness of cliché, the need to find newness in the way one wrote about the world, and, unconsciously I think, the supreme importance of exuberance.”      These qualities are much more in alignment with O’Hara’s smaller more quotidian poems. Writing about “Personal Poem,”      David Lehman notes, “So casual and conversational and spontaneous is this poem, so committed to the rhythms of speech…The music is in the heart of noise, the poetry something subtle in the midst of all that seems wildly antipoetic.”

In the wilds of the antipoetic is where Ochester makes his home. The Pittsburgh School of Poetry is less entranced with the Avant-Garde, and much more concerned with Dirty Realism. That literary movement, which had its heyday in the 1980s, however, is more associated with fiction writers like Anne Beattie, Tobias Wolff, and Richard Ford than with poets.

The author Bill Buford, who coined the term, defines Dirty Realism thusly, “Dirty Realism is the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwanted mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate.”      Aside from “disturbing detachment,”      for if anything Ochester is extremely attached to the people and experiences he writes about, this is pretty good shorthand for the subject matter Pittsburgh School poets apply themselves to.

What is missing from Buford’s description is any commentary on the aesthetic values of the movement. Writers of Dirty Realism pare their tools, in this case the words on the page, down to the essentials. Their work is immediately recognizable by its spare, unadorned language. Perhaps the most famous Dirty Realist was Raymond Carver whose sharply whittled stories and unfussy terse language is still influencing writers today. It should not go unstated that while Carver is justifiably remembered for his groundbreaking stories, he also published several excellent collections of poetry which espoused the same literary values as his prose.

By taking from O’Hara’s literary exuberance and love of his everyday sights and sounds and mixing that with the Dirty Realists’ spare language and tendency to a darker worldview Ochester arrives at his particular brand of poetry as seen here in the poem “Messages,”

The Boiling Springs Presbyterian Church—
a name worthy of Dante—
advises on its signboard
“Pray Hard, Life is Short”
though it might be wiser to say
“Live Hard, Life Is Short”
though by “live hard” I don’t mean
more fucking, money, or booze
though those are estimable things
but more living like a T’ang poet
walking the lonely mountains,
in winter
watching snow swirl on rock
in summer
memorizing flowers
and if you live hard enough
please observe how the colorful
butterflies as they flutter
delicately sip sustenance
from puddles of mud
from small or great
mounds of manure.
O Boiling Springs Presbyterians,
your God, if He exists,
is a sly One shy
ironic God.

I’m going to call what Ochester does in this poem “muddling.” Muddling, not in the sense of confusing and obfuscating, but in the sense of creating a perfectly balanced cocktail. If you don’t muddle the mint leaves and lime juice thoroughly, then your Mojito just won’t sing. And here in “Messages” Ochester is definitely singing. From his O’Hara bag Ed pulls literary references, deployed almost like punchlines, to Dante, who as a poet road-mapped Christian cosmology, and to the Chinese poets of the T’ang dynasty, complete with an in-poem homage to Wang Wei. Add to that a finishing splash of O’Hara-esque exuberance with the exclamatory “O Boiling Springs, Presbyterians!”

The Dirty Realists provide the attention to signage, and the oddly secular indulgence by the church in advertising sloganeering, as well as this sentiment on the part of Ochester, “I don’t mean / more fucking, money, or booze / though those are estimable things.” “Fucking,”“money,” and “booze” all come across as guttural in sound as well as meaning. Then there’s the butterflies that “delicately sip sustenance / from puddles of mud / from small or great / mounds of manure.” Are people the butterflies and organized religion the manure? Is “fucking, money, or booze” as estimable as ancient Chinese poetry and the metaphysics of Dante? In Ochester’s poetry the answer is yes.

This leads to the next tenet of the Pittsburgh School of Poetry. It’s actually a simple equation that looks like this: “History > Nostalgia”. Ed Ochester was a great student of history. His poems are filled with references to historical figures (Jonas Salk, Teddy Roosevelt, Karl Marx) and events (the firebombing of Dresden, Marshall Badoglio’s surrender in Africa, the founding of Zoroastrianism). He had a particular fondness for the ancients. In an interview published by The Alembic, Ed said, “I mention Greek and Roman figures often because they’re important to me (and our culture) — the founding fathers based our Constitution on what they learned from Greek and Roman experience, and that experience informs not just our literature but our science, religion, philosophy and historiography.”

While his poems are liberally peppered with allusions to the past Ochester did not suffer from a nostalgic frame of mind. There’s no longing for some blurry days of yore, no romanticization of some sepia-tinted long ago. The past was of interest to Ed because it was full of people making decisions and living their lives as best they could. Those people weren’t much, if even at all, different from us in his opinion. Ed, in his inimitable fashion, boils down American history to “the titanic battle between the forces / of psychopathic puritanism and / the fun of inevitable sleaze.”

The past as a field of study was also useful to Ed’s poems because it provided a framework for how exactly we got here in our historical moment. If there is one thing Ochester laments most it’s “Why is it we forget everything?” His aversion to nostalgia allows him to write lines like, “Andrew Carnegie the evil Scot / who screwed the workers and then gave them / a library as well as layers of black grime / for all their buildings as well as their lungs” without giving in to any sentimentality regarding the pre-crash steel industry.

Contrast that with something the Pittsburgh poet Michael Wurster once said at a conference I attended in the early 1990s. Wurster announced during his keynote address that “Everyone should write a poem about a steel mill.” Even as a teenager in attendance I found this statement to smack of a certain glib nostalgia whether that was Michael’s intent or not. The steel industry had largely abandoned Pittsburgh and the ensuing cratering of the local economy and the resultant flight from the city of much of its population was a wound that had still not healed when Wurster made his proposition. Reminiscing about the heyday of the mills was as far from my mind as you could possibly get. From my point of view the city as a whole suffered from this pining backward gaze.

Happily, Ochester ain’t going for it. Pittsburgh might be “where the blood of lost workers / haunts the soil beneath the pavement,” but it’s also where “One day a kid yelled / “Hey Asshole!” / and everybody on the street / turned around.”

“In the end, the New York School of poetry has less to do with the city than with a state of mind to which the poet would like to travel,” writes David Lehman. The Pittsburgh School also can be considered a state of mind. Ed Ochester was both a teacher and editor as well as a poet. That means that his particular ideas about what makes a poem a poem, the types of utterances the artform can contain, the diverse field of writers who the art should embrace had a very long reach. In Pittsburgh I can see Ed’s influence both direct and indirect in the work of poets as varied as Jan Beatty, Dave Newman, Cameron Barnett, Lori Jakiela, Rich Gegick, and Scott Silsbe. If we can point to any kind of unifying theory in Ochester’s poetry, and the poets here who have followed in his footsteps, it would be what I’ll call Ed’s “Philosophy of the Humane.”

In his introduction, co-written by fellow Pittsburgh poet Peter Oresick, to “The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Ed shares this assessment on the art, “(P)oems don’t exist to improve you. They do exist to take your breath away, to make you laugh, to show you yourself in a mirror, to allow you to feel as some other person may feel.”

Ochester’s poem “Unreconstructed” leads off with a fair warning, “When people talk about Form / distrust them. / These are the ones / who believe the starving / have themselves to blame / but that the sonnet / has a life of its own.” There are also these lines from “Sunflower,” “you don’t / know where you will be / but you’d better / see where you are.” What I take from these statements is that if you are so caught up in the rules and niceties of poetry while people in this world are suffering then your priorities are out of whack. And without a clear understanding of yourself and the times you live in history will not be kind to you.

Ed’s “Philosophy of the Humane,” and by extension the whole project of The Pittsburgh School of Poetry, boils down to pure compassion for your fellow human beings. In the poems of the Pittsburgh School you can make all the wisecracks you like, call someone a jag-off when it’s deserved, and trust that even when your language is rough it’s still beautiful as long as you never lose sight of the very real people at the center of your practice. As Ochester reminds us in “The Good-Bye, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen Poem,” “May we only ever be lonely / by choice” and then for good measure, just to make sure we get the message, he throws this in, “We are all driving to the house of god / in the dark.”

Kristofer Collins has been writing about books and their authors professionally for over twenty years. He has spent the last fifteen years as the Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine covering the local literary community. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Roundabout Trace published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in 2022. He was the publisher of Low Ghost Press from 2008-2020. His writing has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New Yinzer, 1839, LitHub, Belt Magazine, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Gasconade, Vox Populi, Kidsburgh, Appalachian Journal, The New Antiquarian, Jerry Jazz Musician, Uppagus, and more. He was nominated for a Robert L. Vann Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2022. He is co-curator with Joan Bauer of the long-running Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. The Vesper Room (Luchador Press, 2025) is his latest poetry collection. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their children.