By Peter Beaman
Reading Robert Gibb one can either know Pittsburgh or learn it from his poetry. To “know” is to be from Pittsburgh, preferably starting in the 1950s. To “learn” – you must accept: filter away the placenames (“Saline Street”, “Emsworth”) and study the steel mills, the old streetcars, the bridges, the stacked stooped housing of Gibb’s hometown Homestead—the “where this is”. Gibb’s poetry is largely about Homestead, but it could be about the whole “Steel Valley”: Braddock, Clairton, Donora, Duquesne, Homestead, Monessen, Pittsburgh itself.
As one who purportedly “knows” I find I also need to learn. Pittsburgh is extensively written: Michael Chabon, Annie Dillard, Haniel Long, Ed Ochester, Peter Oresick, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson –and Robert Gibb –have written the city and its peoples. Others have done the same thing in paint: Romare Beardon, Doug Cooper, Aaron Gorson, John Kane…. Much of Gibb’s poetry is ekphrastic: we find also Eugene Atget, Walker, Evans, Raphael and other artists: and these blend into the poems. Artistic techniques – photography, charcoal, paint – evince a visuality central to Gibb’s manner. His imagery is at once foundational and then divergent to Gibb’s verbal escapades: now, then, water, fire, air – and his architectonic: bridges, mills, smokestacks, rails – and his times: 1893, 1929, the 1950s, 2001 and almost “now.” But Gibb’s poetry is also a melancholy elegy for the steel-making past.
It was tough: grit, heat, oppression. Gibb’s grandfather died in the flames, a mill accident. His father is described as mentally ill. His mother died early, possibly in Gibb’s childbirth. His stepmother was cruel; his aunt a stern Methodist: her piano played but hymns. From these Gibb expanded into different sounds – blues and jazz. He quotes the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal as saying: “Pittsburgh meant everything to me/and it still does.”
I have before me two of Robert Gibb’s most recent books: Among Ruins (2017), and Pittsburghese (2024). Both are prize winners, and among other many other prize winners of his 13 books of poems. Among Ruins won Notre Dame’s Ernest Sandeen poetry prize; Pittsburghese was selected by Michican State University for publication in its Wheelbarrow Books series. Among other prizes Gibb has won the 2019 Prize Americana for Poetry, a National Poetry Series selection, NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize and awards from Prairie Schooner.
The opening paragraphs of this review are a try at situating Gibb’s work for the “learners”, those who don’t know “where this is.” Gibb’s poetry, even for someone who “knows”, is well worth learning, and I shall try to show why, and how this learning can occur. Even those who “know” don’t know everything in these books – not about Homestead, not about steel, not about Gibb’s decades…. Homestead grew among other steel towns along the Monongahela River, which runs north out of West Virginia to Pittsburgh, there blending with the Allegheny to become the Ohio. The “Mon” is central in Gibb’s landscape, bearing a barge traffic which once made Pittsburgh a crucial port city. In “Two Views of the River” we find:
The floating acres drifting slowly past:
Barges and the broad shoals of the river
On which the tug waves break, a stand
Of sandbar willows canted over water …
And Gibb knows how to contrast anything, particularly these views:
…If I looked up at the hill
On which I now stand looking down,
I’d have seen the last level rays of light
Molten among the deep crowned trees…
Those “last level rays” set the time: a kid has crossed a bridge and hurried uphill home in time for dinner.
Gibb’s ekphrasis – his sympathy and poetic symbiosis with visual art—is full on display in “Industrial Pittsburgh: Works on Paper,” which divides into three unrhymed sonnets based on hypothetical works by Whistler, J.M.W. Turner and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. For Whistler, “Pittsburgh looks celestial, hovering in midair,/The way water does in the distance/Above whatever mirror might cast it there.” About “Turner in Homestead”, Gibb writes: “He’s painted keelmen floating coal to at night,/The red flecks of their deck lamps/Daubed within the loose notational haze.”
“Loose notational haze”: what can this mean? The French poet Pierre Reverdy argued in his review Nord-Sud in 1918 that “the image is a pure creation of the mind.” It joins two realities more or less distant from each other. “The more distant and just the realities, the stronger the image….” Here the notations are the deck lamps daubed. The haze itself is not notational; yet the deck lamps are. Notations are conceptually distant from haze, yet here within it, and the haze become “notational.”
But the best of the “Works on Paper” is “Piranesi”, an 18th c. artist famous for his drawings of prisons and enormous foreboding architectures, huge cranes and catastrophic hooks dangling over small humans – all as in the Homestead Works:
All in that welter of piled-up perspectives
We’ve come to recognize as his: a space
Both cavernous and congested. It’s as though
Here in the mills he’s entered one of his own
Imaginary prisons, their fantastic maze
Of chambers no less starved for light.
Gibb’s poetry shares “the piled-up perspectives” and sometimes, I think, the recognition that the mills were his family’s prison.
Gibb’s grandfather apparently died in a mill accident in the early 1900s. Gibb’s father – apparently—did not work in “the Mill” but rana retail business (not identified in these books). Gibb himself spent time in the Mill as a late adolescent, remembered in many of the poems. There is in addition to family history a recognition of past oppression by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and their lawyer Philander Chase Knox, co-founder (with James Reed) of the still existent firm of ReedSmith LLP. Knox is embalmed in an eponymous poem as “Carnegie’s colluding attorney”, who “charged the Homestead strikers with conspiracy”, and who (per Gibb) was judged by Frick as the “best lawyer I have ever had for our interests.” As asserted in “Newspaper Days: Dreiser in Pittsburgh, 1893-4”, Theodore Dreiser’s editor said not to report about the rich: “The big steel men here just about own this place.” Dreiser noticed, nevertheless, the “Coal & Iron police – armed goons on horseback”. And:
Streetcars and wagons, Steamboats
Like threshers chopping their swaths.
And along the factory shore before him,
Tongues of fire licking the air
Ten, twelve feet above the blowstacks,
And that sound he’d liken to anvils
Being pounded underground.
These themes are continued in Pittsburghese, with the twist that now we are looking back at the debris. The mills have closed – 80,000 jobs were lost in the “Steel Valley” in the 1980s (This economic disaster has been well described in John Hoerr’s And the Wolf Finally Came (1988): in this case as the result of disastrous bargaining between “Big Steel” and “Big Labor.”)
The workers’ heirs, including Gibb and his cohort, mature in the divided attention reflected in Pittsburghese: the past is despoiled, the present despoiling. Pittsburghese is not arresting as Among Ruins but packs a different punch. The title poem is oddly about “jaggers”, a form of noxious brambles, which may in addition refer to an insulting phrase of “Pittsburghese”. Perhaps this reflects a change of venue: many (most?) of the poems describe Gibb’s childhood and adolescence.
Carnegie is flayed again – along with his supposed “morality of self-improvement” seen by Gibb as: “His philanthropy a form of self-esteem,/Though others were beggared by the cost.” This occurs in a poem about the bankruptcy of the Pittsburgh Athletic Association (in 2017). A bit much on Andrew Carnegie maybe? The man left 90% of his estate to charity. He founded what is now Carnegie Mellon University, celebrated by Gibb for its steel-making mural in Among Ruins. He funded libraries everywhere, but these are described as “one of the perks of the urban poor.” The P.A.A. itself –at its bankruptcy sale—had “the lobby paintings/ I’d pause before –horses posed in profile,/And those lush green landscapes/The decades had dusked with gold./Hardly the cautery of light I watched burning nightly above the slag heaps.”
Gibb’s stepmother gets a drubbing in various ways. “Summa Theologiae” is a litany of her excreta: “’Count yourself lucky’, she told me. ‘If your mother/Were still alive, you’d be going to parochial school.’” Amen! In “At End to the Marriage. My Stepmother Buys Twin Beds” Gibb queries “Am I to believe she ever took him in her hand/And then into her, returning her petals to the stem?” The father –Gibb’s father, we are led to believe—was:
Billeted now on that thin celibate bed,
How could he have risen the next morning,
Or any of the ones after that
Only to enter the world at Homestead
Where light from the river, our poor open sewer,
Had backed up again past Braddock?
I find this imagery excessive (“How could he have risen the next morning…only to enter the world, …our poor open sewer, etc.”) What should the father have done?
On the other hand, in “Bildungsroman” the father gives a “toughen up” speech to a crying adolescent son, not realizing that the son is wondering what to be – not why he got cut from the swimming team. This is adolescent angst at its most evocative.
Notwithstanding any critique, there are some real gems in Pittsburghese. “The Hall Mirror” is one: Gibb describes hanging for his youngest son the same mirror his father had hung for the young Gibb:
How a pane of framed still waters
Now will hover on the hinges to his room,
Light falling into the prisms of the bevel,
The film of silvering at the back of the glass,
Father, because glass is conceived in fire,
The quick breath flashed through its crystals.
“The Hall Mirror” an unrhymed sonnet, ends perfectly in the complex image just quoted. A stanza from “Deer Season” brilliantly echoes the past in the present:
Driving backroads home from Black Lick
In November, the leaves all fallen,
A few flakes eddying on the late-day air.
And down in a swale of smoke-blue shadow
A pair of hunters dressing the deer
They’d hung from a tree in their yard.
Barn and farmhouse and corn crib,
The coppery burr of sunlight topping the ridge,
We might have just elected FDR.
Eddying “on the late-day air”: the “on” is exactly right. Among the final poems in Pittsburghese, are “Skinhead” and “Skunk Journal”. “Skinhead” describes a speed-infested “skinhead” “so cranked full of amphetamines/He’s careening wildly in his skin.” This is the heir to the millworker – my take: the kid without a job in the mill, without a future, too dumb to know the past, too vagrant to be the present. In fact, “Skunk Journal” (nodding to Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” in its detailed description of a skunk waddling across a lawn) –“Skunk Journal” shows an even broader picture of futility. Its last stanza:
I’d barely begun this poem when a girl
Was shot on her way to a cousin’s party. Dusk
And he somehow mistook her for a skunk:
Small, far-off, padding into consequence.
These days, this is not maudlin. But is it what’s left of Gibb’s “Steel Valley”?
Robert Gibb is a real poet, which says a lot. Much can be faulted with over-repetitive themes. Much could be enlarged with a broader sense of time passing through a larger lens. Pittsburghese charts new themes: the poet has aged, is apparently married and has two sons. Who are they to know and what about their father’s life? An imagist so intricate as Gibb may find – refracted in his own remembrance – the next generation’s engagement with an occluded past, an unknown future. We have to assume – and I do—that most or all of Gibb’s remembered scenes are real: they happened, and happened to him in some form or other. Somehow, on the way from angst to poet Gibb has already escaped Homestead. But for him, “escaped” may not be what he wants. He must –I think—if books are forthcoming, re-industrialize. Work must be let grow. Time must play a different role. The end-games of accident, madness, debris and disaster are not the only “Varieties of Religious Experience,” as told in Pittsburghese: “All these years I’m still clinging to things.” Let’s hope that’s not all there is.
Peter Beaman is a writer who lived in Pittsburgh for sixty years and now lives in New Mexico, where he is pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at the University of New Mexico. His book, Deck of Cards, describes Pittsburgh young professionals during the 1980s. His son lives in Braddock in the “Steel Valley”.
