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The Poetry of Pittsburgh

The Poetry of Pittsburgh

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When I began this blog more than two years ago, I didn’t think long about the quotation I would use across the top. I knew it would come from Annie Dillard’s book An American Childhood.

“When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

A few years ago, on our way back from visiting Tom’s family in Indiana, we stopped in Pittsburgh, where Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945. It was a literary pilgrimage for me. Our first view of the city (where I had lived as a toddler, pre-memory), came at dusk, as we drove into a tunnel and out and suddenly there were the three rivers and the bridges crossing them all lit up with white lights and it seemed magical to me, this old city of groaning steel and trestles.

Was it the place itself that exerted this magic, or was it because I was primed to love it by Dillard’s words? “I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding.”

It was both, I think. The place of poetry. The poetry of place.

 Photo by Peter Tooker 2010 All Rights Reserved. From the blog Open Windows.

Lee’s Place

Lee’s Place

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Today is the birthday of Harper Lee, who was born in 1926 and still lives in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. She has written one book,  To Kill a Mockingbird; it won the Pulitzer and has sold more than 300 million copies. 

“I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it,” Lee said in a 2006 issue of Oprah magazine.

The Monroe County Public Library, I wonder, is that the library she searches? Or the library of Alabama Southern Community College, located in Monroeville? I scan the college website and find a notice for the 15th annual Alabama Writer’s Symposium, with its topic “Write Out of Place,” being held (yes) this weekend.

Here’s how the symposium is advertised, first with this quotation from Katherine Mansfield: “How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — like rags and shreds of your very life.”

And then with the following: “When Mansfield wrote those lines, she could have been describing the way that Alabama authors often find themselves in relation to their home. Whether they set stories lovingly in Alabama, loathingly in Alabama, or deliberately not in Alabama, place becomes a part of who they are. …  The 2012 Alabama Writers Symposium explores the ways in which Alabama writers are affected by their ‘placehood,’  the ways in which Alabama as a place informs their literary efforts.”

Lee lived in New York for a while, and she spent time away in college and when she was helping her childhood friend, Truman Capote (another native of Monroeville), research In Cold Blood in Kansas. But she has spent most of her life in Monroeville. She has not escaped from her place; she doesn’t seem to have wanted to.


Third Place

Third Place

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This is Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, a place to meet friends, to picnic, to hang out. It is neither home nor work. It is what Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place.” But there are few such places in modern cities. “Our urban topography presently favors those who prefer to be alone, to stay in their homes, or to restrict their outings to relatively exclusive settings,” Oldenburg says in his book The Great Good Place.

I would say this design flaw applies most of all to suburban topography, to the design of subdivisions without center and without stores and without a pleasant place to congregate for an hour or two.  I know of nowhere in my neighborhood where people can gather with a regular crowd for a beverage and some conversation; and there certainly are no Central Parks. The closest tavern is a sports bar with a dozen or more conversation-killing TV screens on the walls. The one local coffee shop closes at 2 p.m. We buy our goods at anonymous malls and shopping centers.

“The problem of place in America manifests itself in a sorely deficient informal public life,” Oldenburg says. “The structure of shared experience beyond that offered by family, job and passive consumerism is small and dwindling. The essential group experience is being replaced by the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals. American lifestyles … are plagued by boredom, loneliness, alienation and a high price tag. America can point to many areas where she has made progress, but in the area of informal public life she has lost ground and continues to lose it.”

I finished Oldenburg’s book with a stunning takeaway point: that what we think are individual and family failings are actually deficits of community and place. That we have only just begun to plumb what placelessness has done to us.

On Broadway

On Broadway

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The tune has been in my head the last few days. The tune is there because I was there. On Broadway, that is. Not the part George Benson sings about, not the place where “the neon lights are bright.” Not Times Square Broadway.

I’m talking Upper West Side Broadway. Corner grocers, vacuum cleaner stores, coffee shops. There was a time when I lived there that if I ran out of paper and had to run down to the tiny stationary store to buy some, I hesitated. I would have been on deadline then (I was always on deadline that year) and I knew I would run into at least a couple of people I knew on the way there and back. Could I afford the time to buy the paper and chat with the friends?

The answer, always, was yes.  I had lived there for a few months. And when I walked down Broadway I knew people. I didn’t need neon lights.

Saturday, during my 21-hour visit to Manhattan, I had time to walk from 114th to 77th Street. The sun was bright, the air was warm, the pedestrians were of every size, shape and color.  I didn’t know people to talk to along the way. But I had left one good friend at 113th Street and met another at 77th. My feet flew down the pavement. There was energy and street life. It was good to be back on Broadway.

Cross Walk

Cross Walk

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Yesterday I tried something new, something I hadn’t seen in the 23 years we’ve lived in this neighborhood — a crosswalk. It’s our corner’s first. A touch of the city in the suburbs. A time-out for the traffic. A vote of confidence in walkers everywhere.

I pushed the button, and I waited. And waited. And waited.

I started to run across the street against the light. After all, there were no cars coming. It’s what I usually do, wait for a pause in the stream of cars and then thread my way across.

But yesterday, since the cosmos (and the Virginia Department of Transportation) was giving me a break, I gave them one, too. I was a good citizen, a patient pedestrian. I waited my turn. But when the sign said “Walk” — I ran.

I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

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But I make up for it when I return. It’s the years in the wilderness, the suburban wilderness. They have softened me, I suppose, turned me into a tourist. I snap and snap and don’t care if people think I’m a tourist. I’m easily impressed. I look up.

Every direction is a photograph. The ripple of water in a lagoon, the play of light on a brownstone, the San Remo glimpsed through a screen of bright willow green.

Maybe we should move back to New York, I say to Tom, knowing, before the words leave my mouth, how foolish they sound, the four-bedroom colonial back in Virginia filled to bursting. Knowing that life has taken me far from the person I was when I made my way in Manhattan years ago.

But that’s the point of travel. Possibilities present themselves. Life, in all its fullness, returns.

Walking in the City

Walking in the City

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A walker in the suburbs strolls the streets or ambles through the woods, but her destination is secondary. She walks for the walking and not for where it takes her.

Compare this to a walker in the city, pounding the concrete day after day. Here is walking with purpose, commuting on foot or by subway (which must also be walked to and from); walking to the corner for a newspaper, to the market for a quart of milk. Walking because it’s faster than taking a cab. Walking because, well, it’s just the way you get around. It is the air you breathe; it is the environment.

All this is to say, a walker in the suburbs forgets how much she walked when she lived in the big city. And when she goes back there her feet remind her. Her soul too. It soars.

New Neighborhood

New Neighborhood

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Yesterday, a walk in a new neighborhood: Strolling down a paved path that flanked a busy suburban byway, I crossed under the road through a pedestrian tunnel, automatically plugging my nose as I learned to do in New York, but unnecessarily, since the only whiff I got was of concrete.

The path wound along a creek, where gangs of loose-limbed kids sifted the water, looking for tadpoles. I could see the road I needed to be on, but took a chance that the path would bring me back where I’d begun.

I passed willows that gleamed with the first green of spring. And farther along there were more kids, careening down the path on too-big bikes or too-small scooters. A playground sign that said “For children ages 5-9” had been altered: “For children ages 5-59.” Young mothers threw back their heads and laughed. No one seemed to have a care.

I know that the homes along the path sheltered bankruptcies and infidelities, rebellious teenagers and addled grandparents. It was just that, in that early spring light, these didn’t seem to matter. It seemed like a new beginning, like an Eden.

Stegner and Place

Stegner and Place

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Today is the birthday of Wallace Stegner, writer, teacher and celebrator of place. The American West was his place and he described it well, its aridity and openness, the loneliness of its grain elevators and grasslands, the way it has shaped our character.

The New World transient is a person in motion, Stegner says. “Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none.” Because he moved frequently himself, Stegner knows “the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness.” Which leads him to this conclusion:

“A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities, over more than one generation.”

I have thought about these words often since reading them this fall, have considered their truth as I try to feel at home in the suburbs. Thinking about them has led me to the library, to books about the people who lived here before us, to local historians who’ve discovered lost roads. I’m trying my best to feel at home here. But the “dissatisfaction and hunger” remain.

Old Part of Town

Old Part of Town

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Yesterday I drove to the old part of town, to a D.C. I seldom visit, where the houses are stately and imposing and the yards settled and calm. I was struck, as I often am, by how various neighborhoods and landscapes create different moods.

How wide open and exposed is the world of the outer suburbs, how on the edge of things. I think about the medieval town, walled and protected, houses clinging together for survival. And I see in our wide yards a sort of bravado.

Openness has its appeal, but so does the fenced yard, the closed gate, the hedged garden. There is something in here precious enough to protect — to make you long to be inside.