Underneath Pittsburgh's shot-and-a-beer, rust belt exterior beats the heart of a poet.
For the past 32 years, in a lecture hall a few miles from the city's abandoned steel mills and light years from its blue-collar image, the International Poetry Forum has showcased the world's great poets.To the literary greats who grace its stage, the forum has offered a place to read poetry to the masses, to explain the inspiration of the words and to see firsthand how a verse is received.
To the ordinary people who come to listen, the forum offers a chance for housewives, accountants and janitors to meet icons most people only read about in English literature classes.
"I think it would be hard to find a poet or a critic of substance and national standing who has not been invited to the poetry forum," said Miller Williams, the poet who read at President Clinton's second inauguration in January 1997. "I don't know anywhere that I've been where I've felt more intellectually satisfied."
Founder Samuel Hazo, who also is Pennsylvania's state poet, began the forum in 1966 with a performance by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish.
Other luminaries followed: W.H. Auden; Anne Sexton; Tennessee Williams; Princess Grace; James Earl Jones.
"The first reading, we turned away almost 300 people in the rain," Hazo said.
Attendance has been strong ever since.
"A lot of people were coming to the readings not for the poetry, but for the answers," said Hazo. "Poetry . . . is the sole means we have to learning the answer to the essential question, the question of who we are."
Actress Jane Alexander visited the forum during her four-year tenure as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, which ended in October. She said the forum "brings poetry a kind of new renaissance."
"I think these things are cyclical," she said. "Poetry was really big when I was in college. I mean, if you were a poet . . . you got kind of (social) carte blanche.
"Now it's coming back again, and I think a lot of it started with professional poets like Sam (Hazo), and (former poet laureate) Rita Dove, and other major poets who had bully pulpits."
Actor Gregory Peck, who appeared at the forum to do a reading of W.B. Yeats, said he hoped to recruit others to do the same.
"It was an outstanding evening for me," said Peck. "Everyone seemed to be pleased with the outcome."
At one recent performance, people trudged into the lecture hall on a snowy weeknight to hear poet Nancy Willard. Some listened with rapt attention, leaning forward, eyes fixed on the poet as she explained the inspiration for her poetry: trips to the hardware store, headlines from the sports pages. Others leaned back with their eyes closed and let the words soak in.
As a child, accountant J.J. Bosley - who attended the Willard reading with his wife, Margaret - was taken to the forum by his mother.
"I was dragged kicking and screaming," he said, although he has been coming - and loving it - ever since.