Music Credits: “Renewal” composed and performed by Doug and Judy Smith
Jan Beatty: I started taking one class at a time at night in poetry and so one of my teachers said, “Why don’t you go to grad school?” and I said, “How could I go to grad school?” I had a mindset that was from a place of no money and just not thinking about those things. And then I said, “Well, why can’t I go?”
Jo Reed: That is poet Jan Beatty. And this is
Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.
This weekend, poets from around the country are coming to Washington DC for the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Split This Rock calls poets to a greater role in public life while it celebrates poetry that looks at injustice and provokes social change. The award-winning poet Jan Beatty is brilliant addition to the festival line-up. Jan’s poems are often fierce and sometimes funny. They’re about growing up in working-class Pittsburgh, her years of social work, of waitressing, and her coming to terms with her sense of dislocation as an adopted child. Jan operates as a unique insider-outsider in the world of poetry. Her fifth collection of poetry is coming out next year, and she directs the creative writing program at Carlow University. But far from forgetting where she comes from—she owns it in her poetry, all of it: the pride, the limitations, the satisfaction, the complexity and the rage associated with working with your hands, working to make ends meet, and working because that’s what you do. Her poem “Company Car” is a great distillation of working-class challenges and ingenuity.
Jan Beatty: “Company Car.” “To make sure, they took out the backseat, left a dirty hole for hauling supplies. My father worked for American Tobacco when smoking was glamorous and profits fatter. We set up little red and white folding chairs in the back hull of the Ford Fairlane sedan, 1960 black with red vinyl interior. Me and my sister, seven years before Woodstock, we rock and rolled crazy down the street. I was 10 and didn’t know the history of the company store. Laughing and falling over my father’s eyes in the rearview; my mother scowling. I didn’t know the shame of it. Our screams of stupid joy reminded them of what we were: working class, afraid of being seen riding around, afraid my father would lose his job. He couldn’t take us to school or church, but he did. He was the builder of our lives, carving our way through the lies around us. Is that why he yelled so much at our silliness? Where did he put his rage as he pulled the black car into the garage and turned the key? I saw him late one night under the side house light. He took it and put it stone by stone in the driveway wall, heaving and radiant. I saw him give rage a body, breathe it alive.”
Jo Reed: Jan, can you just briefly walk us through this poem?
Jan Beatty: So my father was a steel worker, and he actually did punch out his foreman at the mill so he was fired. Then he worked for American Tobacco as a salesman. They gave him this car, and they took out the backseat so his family couldn’t ride in it, and that was our only car. And I thought, “Oh, I can't believe this.” I mean as a kid I didn’t really get it. I thought, well, we’ve got this weird car, and we have these chairs in the back of it. I do remember that we weren’t supposed to be riding in it, and we weren’t supposed to be seen. And I really didn’t understand. But we had fun; we were just messing around in the backseat, my sister and I. You know, it was my dad’s birthday yesterday. I was thinking of him and seeing – when I read those lines about him building that driveway wall, I can really see it and feel him out there. I could tell he was really angry, but I didn’t know why.
Jo Reed: Yeah, it’s like the rage was palpable. Tell me about your journey to poetry, because I know it was a long one, and it wasn’t exactly a straight line.
Jan Beatty: Yeah, that would be an understatement there. So my father, as I said, was a steelworker, and my mother never worked outside of the home and a working-class family in Pittsburgh. And we never really talked about art that much, or poetry, or music, etcetera. We did learn the art of living, however, which was very important. No one in my family ever went to college. I was the first one to go. Because of that, it never occurred to me that I could be a writer. I mean although I was writing since I was very young, I was winning the poetry contests in first grade, etcetera. But when it came time go to college, I just didn’t think it was possible for me—someone like me—to do that.
Jo Reed: Did you think about “me as a writer” and then said, “Oh, no, that isn’t possible” or it wasn’t even on the horizon?
Jan Beatty: Oh, yeah, that’s all I thought about because I was writing since I was small. And I had diaries and locked journals and many poems. I mean I thought it was for other people—people with money, people who could somehow do this—and that my job as part of my family was to do well in school and get a job so it just didn’t seem like an option to me. And so then I became a social worker for five years and worked in maximum-security prisons. I worked in an abortion clinic. I worked at the welfare office. And then I realized I was kind of a bad social worker. And then I quit and became a waitress, and that’s when I started writing again because it just gave me the time, and I gave up on some cultural idea of success and I just said, “I’m just going to write my poems.” And when I went to grad school at the University of Pittsburgh, that’s when things sort of turned around.
Jo Reed: Actually, I would love to have you read one of your poems that kind of speaks to this.
Jan Beatty: Sure.
Jo Reed: And it’s from your book
Boneshaker, “My Father Teaches Me to Dream.”
Jan Beatty: Sure. I’d be happy to. My father – he was kind of tough but he taught me a lot. And we used to have fights about work all the time, and this is really one of those fights in this poem. You can’t tell but it’s all in italics and this is in his voice. I’m going to try to read it like he would say it. “My Father Teaches Me to Dream”: “You want to know what work is? I’ll tell you what work is. Work is work. You get up. You get on the bus. You don’t look from side to side; you keep your eyes straight ahead. That way nobody bothers you. See? You get off the bus. You work all day. You get back on the bus at night, same thing. You go to sleep. You get up. You do the same thing again, nothing more, nothing less. There’s no handouts in this life. All this other stuff you’re looking for, it ain’t there. Work is work.”
Jo Reed: And that is a very typical conversation in a working-class family where you’re working to survive.
Jan Beatty: Absolutely. That was my dad, but he was a good guy. He was from another time.
Jo Reed: Well I think the importance of your father to your life and the closeness that you have with him is something that comes through again and again in your poems, and it’s very, very moving.
Jan Beatty: Ah, thanks. Yeah, I was very lucky to have him because I was adopted and I was – spent the first year of my life in a place called Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. And I don’t have any memory of that time, but I was really lucky to get my father.
Jo Reed: Did you choose to be a waitress because you were also writing or was it waitressing and then somehow that freed up a part of your mind to write?
Jan Beatty: I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know how to do that. I just knew I had to get out of social work, and I had to make a living. And so waitressing seemed to be a good option and actually I have some waitress poems. I learned a lot about people. It was a 15-year period of waitressing so that’s a long time.
Jo Reed: I waitressed for many years, as well.
Jan Beatty: Oh, great. So you know –
Jo Reed: I know exactly –
Jan Beatty: Once a waitress, always a waitress <laughs>.
Jo Reed: <laughs> There’s no question about it.
Jo Reed: Well I’d love to hear something from
Mad River and what I’m going to ask you is “A Waitress’s Instruction.”
Jan Beatty: Okay. I’ll read this and then I’ll tell you about some – the hate mail that I got, afterwards, about the poem. Okay. So this is serious instructions on tipping. “A Waitress’s Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don’t Waste my Time”: “Twenty percent minimum as long as the waitress doesn’t inflict bodily harm. If you’re two people at a four top, tip extra. If you sit a long time, pay rent. Double tips for special orders. Always tip extra when using coupons. Better yet, don’t use coupons. Never leave change instead of bills; no pennies. Never hide a tip for fun. Over-tip, then tip some more. Remember I am somebody’s mother or daughter. No separate piles of change for large parties. If people in your party don’t show up, tip for them. Don’t wait around for gratitude. Take a risk. Don’t adjust your tip so your credit-card total is even. Don’t ever, ever pull out a tipping guide in public. If you leave ten percent or less, eat at home. If I call a taxi for you, tip me. If I hang up your coat for you, tip me. If I get cigarettes for you, tip me; better yet, do it yourself. Don’t fold a bill and hand it to me like you’re a big shot. Don’t say, ‘There’s a big tip in it for you if.’ Don’t say, ‘I want to make sure you get this’ like a busboy would steal it. Don’t say, ‘Here, Honey. This is for you’ ever. If you buy a fifty-dollar bottle of wine, pull out a ten. If I serve you one cocktail, don’t hand me thirty-five cents. If you’re just having coffee, leave a five.”
Jo Reed: That is from <laughter> Jan’s first book called
Mad River. Do tell us about the mail.
Jan Beatty: Yeah. It was kind of shocking to me. This is actually one of my most anthologized poems and so it does hit some chord. Anyway, I got a call from the editor of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the paper in town. They had published the waitress poem in the paper. And he said, “Look. We’re getting a lot of letters about this poem.” He said, “I don’t want to start a tipping war in the paper,” and I said, “Why not? That’s exactly what we need” <laughs>. But he wouldn’t do it. He told me about this letter written by a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and this woman is not there anymore, but she said, “Who does Jan Beatty think she is telling us how to tip? This is a terrible poem.” And I really wasn’t that upset about it because it was clear to me that she was a bad tipper <laughs>. It’s funny. People have gotten mad at me at readings. But another thing that’s happened here is this poem has traveled around the country, and it has ended up in bus stands around the country, which is very cool. I did this reading in – I think it was in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and one of the young students said, “We had that poem posted in our bus stand and everyone loved it.” And so it’s kind of doing what we want poetry to do, which is be part of the community, get out of the classroom and do something. It’s kind of great.
Jo Reed: The other thing that I’ve noticed about your poetry is, to me, it seems pretty observational, too. You have poems that just observe, and I think and this could be me completely reading into it, but partly I think it could come from waitressing where in fact you do have to look at your station and really figure out where everybody is and what they need pretty quickly.
Jan Beatty: Yes, no one’s ever said that to me before, but, yeah, that’s really smart of you because I think I learned the most when I was waitressing out of any job. Because, as you know, like you just said, you have to be quick, you have to know what’s going on, and then you have to be able to deal with all kinds of people quickly. I kind of loved it, and of course I don’t want to romanticize it. Waitressing is a tough job and your feet hurt and you get some difficult people, but I learned how to deal with people. So, yeah, that observation is key. So you check out people’s moods, the way they’re looking at you, the way they’re holding themselves. You can tell if they’re in a hurry, and you can use that for everything in your life.
Jo Reed: Writing wasn’t a possibility for you; you thought you became a social worker. What drew you to that?
Jan Beatty: You know, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was young and running around, and I had many majors. I started out in phys. ed., which didn’t make a lot of sense until I later found out my birth father was a professional hockey player; he actually won three Stanley Cups with the Toronto Maple Leafs, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just wanted to hit things, and I had no idea why, but it made sense later. So I was going to be in phys. ed. and then I went into journalism, and then I was a social worker. And I wanted to help people. I wanted to do something that made sense to me. And because of my background, I knew a lot about trouble, and so I felt like I could be useful. But I didn’t know what it was like in a maximum-security prison, and I was definitely in over my head. I was 23 years old working in a maximum-security prison. That was not the best fit.
Jo Reed: Were you writing during this time?
Jan Beatty: You know, I wasn’t. I wasn’t writing. I was just living—not just, I was living. It turned out that years later I would write about some of these situations. I was just learning a lot and living, which I think is really important for a writer to have experiences. And I don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing to go from undergraduate, writing, to grad school; I think it’s good to do some living in between.
Jo Reed: Were you always curious about your biological parents?
Jan Beatty: Yes. I was told when I was six years old that I was adopted, and I couldn’t really make sense of it at that time. But yes, of course. But it took me many years to get the courage to find them and I found both of them. I met my birth father once, and I met my birth mother a couple times, and it was a huge, huge thing. I’ve actually written a memoir called
American Bastard, which I’m trying to place right now, but with a lot of that difficulty in it in terms of not feeling like a real child, looking at my cousins and noticing they all look alike and wishing I could look like someone—all the things that adoptees experience but usually don’t talk about.
Jo Reed: Can we hear a poem that references your biological father called “Cross-Checking”? And that’s from your latest book called
The Switching Yard.
Jan Beatty: Yeah. I want to mention that my birth father, his name was Bill Ezinicki, as I said Canadian hockey player. He got the most penalties in the postseason play.
Jo Reed: Which is saying something in hockey.
Jan Beatty: <laughs> Yeah, and it sort of explained a lot of my personality when I found that out. So this is called “Cross-Checking”. “My Canadian father fought the rich man’s hockey wars, was known for cross-checking, delivering a bloody body block. He had an insurance policy that paid five bucks for every suture needed to close a cut and he collected. My inheritance: I’m the designated hitter, the base runner, the racquetball king with the killer serve. When my league coach asked me to demonstrate good base running, I hit and ran, steamrolled him at second trying to tag me. We ended up both in the dirt, me over him on all fours, his glasses broken. He got up, piecing them together, brushing dust out of his hair, stared at me and walked off the field. My father’s still inside me now. I’m free of the quiet asking. All the years of not knowing who I was has made me blood hungry. He can collect his money but he can never close the cut of me.”
Jo Reed: And that’s called “Cross-Checking” and that is from your most recent collection called
The Switching Yard. When was your first collection published? And take me through how that happened and how it came together.
Jan Beatty: My first book,
Mad River, was published in 1995. It won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press which was very exciting and still is very exciting. I had been sending out my manuscript for about five years to different presses, different contests. And for the writers out there listening, it takes a while sometimes, and five years is not that long—sometimes it takes many more years. But I would just say, “Don’t give up. Don’t give up. Just keep sending.” And so I got a call from Ed Ochester who is the editor of the University of Pittsburgh Press saying that I won the Starrett Prize, and I was shocked, and I really couldn’t believe it. I thought it was a crank call or something <laughs> so that was really, really exciting and that was really everything. And so I’ve been lucky enough since then to be able to stay with the University of Pittsburgh Press, which is really one of the top university presses in the country. There’s no guarantee with any presses that once you’re with them that you can stay so I’m really lucky with that.
Jo Reed: Yeah. It’s so important to find a home, a publishing home, that is nurturing.
Jan Beatty: Yeah, and they are just terrific, there. I’m so happy to be there.
Jo Reed: You went to Iowa, correct?
Jan Beatty: I did. I started out at the University of Iowa, and I only lasted about two months. And people shake their head at this, but I really felt like it was a class issue for me. There were a lot of privileged students there. It was really homogenous, like almost everybody was white there. And I really felt like if I stayed that my working class poems were not going to survive. So I got a job at a biker bar while I was there in Iowa City. So I thought, well, if I work at this biker bar, then maybe I can last through all of these class issues here. But I just couldn’t do it. I know I could stay for the credential. I know it was hard to get in. You know, one day I just drove away and what I couldn’t fit in my car, I left on the lawn. It was like, “I’ve got to get out of here.” I drove right back to the University of Pittsburgh and tried to start graduate school right away, which I ended up doing.
Jo Reed: I want to hear about your radio show. You host a book show that’s heard on Pittsburgh Public Radio.
Jan Beatty: Yeah, Prosody started at WYEP and John Schulman and Mary Radford, both poets, started that show. And then over the years, as each of them had families and kids, they took leaves from the show, and then I just kind of stepped in. It’s been going for over 20 years. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to all these writers.
Jo Reed: Is it a weekly show?
Jan Beatty: Yeah, it’s a weekly show, and now it’s on WESA, 90.5 FM, NPR affiliate. Unfortunately, it airs at 6:30 a.m. on Saturdays and, of course, it’s podcasted.
Jo Reed: Okay. You have a lot of responsibilities at the university. You’re a writer, and I know firsthand how much work goes into a weekly book show, and especially if you’re actually reading all the books.
Jan Beatty: Right.
Jo Reed: Tell me how you work your time.
Jan Beatty: <laughs> Well, I mean I have another thing where I direct the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow, which is a writing group for women ages 18 to 94. And we have a reading series, we have books that we publish, so there’s a whole lot going on. And what I do is I interview poets, and I have other people who do guest interviews for fiction, because I really couldn’t keep up with the fiction. But we tape in advance, so that helps us. Also, I have great sound engineers who are poets, Lisa Alexander and Michelle Stoner, and they help tremendously, so it’s a team effort. And, yeah, we do it when we can.
Jo Reed: You’ve taught creative writing at a number of schools in the Pittsburgh area—University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Carlow—but you also ran a poetry workshop at a homeless shelter, and you wrote a poem about one of the guys you met there. Will you read that?
Jan Beatty: Certainly. This is called “Poetry Workshop at the Homeless Shelter.” “So I’m the white teacher reading some Etheridge Knight poems to the four residents who showed, for black poets who think of suicide, thinking these guys have seen it all and want something hardcore, when a black man named Tyrone raises his hand. ‘These poems offend me.’ ‘They do?’ I say. ‘Yes, I was raised not to curse, and I don’t see why a poem has to use those words.’ ‘What poems do you like?’ ‘Langston Hughes.’ ‘Yeah,’ someone else says. ‘Jean Toomer, man.’ Tyrone says, ‘Let’s talk about calculating a poem.’ ‘Pardon me?’ I say. ‘You know, ciphering a poem.’ ‘Why don’t you show me?’ Tyrone draws this two-dimensional image of this three-dimensional grid based on numerology, he says, in which each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a number. ‘Look. It’s like you start with a 13, 25, then go to 8, 5, 1, 18 20. That’s the start of my first line.’ My heart opens to the new world. ‘See?’ I am stunned by it all, strange genius or just strange. ‘How long have you been writing this way?’ ‘All my life, but nobody understands it. I got boxes in my room filled with calculations. I got plays and soap operas, and one day I’ll sell them.’ I’m looking into Tyrone’s eyes, beautiful savant, wondering what to say. I’m standing here in my new Levi’s and Chuck Taylor’s, knowing I don’t understand, either, and his desire humbles me. Class is ending, so I ask him to bring more next week so I can see what he’s up to, but he has to see his caseworker about his bad leg jammed up in a street beating in Philly. Now I’m walking out of the shelter, my white skin reminding me how wrong I am most days, thinking about his sweet numbers, his poems luminous with industry. I’m opening the door to my car counting vowels, 13, 25, 8, 5, 1, 18, 20, my heart stirring in the new world.”
Jo Reed: I hope that happened or something like that.
Jan Beatty: <laughter> Yeah, it did happen. I was a very young teacher and teaching in this bridge housing in downtown Pittsburgh. It was for people who were not on the street but couldn’t afford an apartment yet. And you know, I didn’t know. I thought that people would want to hear some tough poems, but I was really wrong about it, as I was <laughs> about many other things. But it was fascinating to hear this guy’s methods. You know, and when I sat down and looked at them, it all worked out, and I thought, wow.
Jo Reed: Oh, that mind. I mean I can't imagine thinking that way.
Jan Beatty: I know, and he was fast. He would just rattle these numbers off, and they were all right. And I thought, “Oh, man. This is great,” and then I thought, “Oh, I mean, what are the chances he’s going to get his work published?” You do what you can do, but I thought – I wanted to at least acknowledge that, “Oh, this is great.”
Jo Reed: I thought it was fabulous. And what about your own writing process? Are you somebody who sits down to write every day at particular times or are you more flexible?
Jan Beatty: Yeah, that’s challenging. I mean I’ve been able to keep writing and get my books coming out, but I think I do my bulk of writing in the summer when I’m off from school, so May to September. I usually go to residencies and really work. I mean of course I write during the school year, but it’s more, “Maybe I’ll give my students exercises and do it with them,” or maybe I’ll be jotting things down, keeping notebooks whenever I travel. Like when I go to Split This Rock this week, I’ll be writing on the plane, writing in hotels, <laughs> wherever I can. And it’s not every day, no.
Jo Reed: God knows I have lists of poems I’d love to have you read, but is there one that you would like to read?
Jan Beatty: Sure. I did used to have this friend, Lou, who I would walk around the streets with and we would give money to people. I’ll tell you more about him after this poem. This is called “The Zen of Tipping.” “My friend, Lou, used to walk up to strangers and tip them. No, really. He’d cruise the south side, pick out the businessman on his way to lunch, the slacker hanging by the beehive, the young girl walking her dog, and he’d go up, pull out a dollar and say, ‘Here’s a tip for you. I think you’re doing a really good job today.’ Then Lou would walk away as the tippee stood in mystified silence. Sometimes he would cut it short with, ‘Keep up the fine work.’ People thought Lou was weird, but he wasn’t. He didn’t have much, worked as a waiter. I don't know why he did it, but I know it wasn’t about the magnanimous gesture, an easy way to feel important. It wasn’t interrupting the impenetrable edge of the individual. You’d have to ask Lou. Maybe it was about being awake, hand to hand sweetness, a chain of kindnesses, or fun, the tenderness we forget in each other.” So this guy, Lou, I used to work with him at The Balcony in Shadyside in Pittsburgh, this jazz club. And we would go out and give people money. It was just fun, and people were shocked. They thought, “What’s the catch? What do you want?” And we’re like, “Nothing, just have a good day.” And it was just kind of fun to do. And Lou, now, is a playwright in New York City, and he’s producing plays. And we just bonded over it. It was a way to sort of open up a day and enjoy it and get away from all the pressures of everything and surprise people. You know, it’s always good to surprise people and give them something small. I mean it was the smallest thing. We just gave them a couple bucks, you know?
Jo Reed: Oh, but still.
Jan Beatty: We weren’t giving away hundreds or anything <laughs>. Yeah, you should try it. I mean everybody should go out and try it. It’s just fun.
Jo Reed: I could put that on my list of things to do.
Jan Beatty: <laughs>
Jo Reed: Well, Jan, it was such a pleasure to speak to you.
Jan Beatty: Oh, and you, too.
Jo Reed: And you’re reading at the festival Friday evening.
Jan Beatty: Yes, it’s 7:30 to 9 with some other poets, and it’s open to the public, so please come. This is Split This Rock. We’re going to invade DC with poetry.
Jo Reed: That was poet Jan Beatty. You can hear Jan at the Split This Rock poetry festival in Washington, DC on April 15. For more information about Jan’s reading and about all of the great festival events, go to splitthisrock.org. You’ve been listening to
Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.
