By Karen J. Weyant
If you’ve ever visited Pittsburgh, you’ve likely encountered “Pittsburghese,” the local dialect of the people of Pittsburgh that distinguishes residents of the city from their Rust Belt neighbors. Pittsburghese is partially defined by dropping the words “to be” from certain phrases, such as The car needs washed instead of The car needs to be washed. It’s using words such as pop instead of soda, or buggy instead of shopping cart. Sure, many linguists may say that these examples are not pure Pittsburgh (my mother, for example, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, always called shopping carts, buggies). But there is one word that always seems to be on the lips of Pittsburgh citizens and on the t-shirts found in city souvenir shops. That word is the second-person plural vernacular, Yinz, a contracted form of “you ones” or “you’ins.”
It’s the word Yinz that echoed through my head as I read the latest poetry collection by Robert Gibb. Pittsburghese is an elegy for a place: Homestead, Pennsylvania, a borough located about 11 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Homestead is rich with labor history, but like so many places, saw a huge economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. With every image, I am reminded of the tiny Rust Belt town of my youth and the importance of story and memory.
The poems in Gibb’s collection take us through an industrial world struggling to survive, and thus, the overarching images in most of these poems have to do with debris, or rust – a word that is celebrated in the poem “The Etymologies of Rust.” In this poem, the narrator describes the red-orange oxidation that appears in so many poems written about the Rust Belt as a “slow, remorseless kind of oxidation” that is “red, orange or tawny. The ferrous of flakes.” It’s a perfect description for those of us who know rust intimately as the corrosion that flakes metal mailboxes, parts of bicycles and chain-linked fences. For Gibb, the color of rust may be beautiful, but the effects of rust are devastating for it “cankers like corrosion on idled iron.”
Physical landscapes, often held together by rust, are at the heart of many of Gibb’s poems. As someone who grew up in a small factory town, I recognize some of the images while others are new. I don’t know the slag pots described in “Deskulling the Slag Pots,” but I know the descriptions of derelict phone booths and furniture being auctioned off from fancy buildings. No matter the image, there is a story. And for many readers, the stories may be a bit familiar. For example, in the poem “Elegy for the Park Theater” the narrator tells us about a time when “we’d be plunged into darkness/Beneath the beam of light figures rode/Onto the screen.” In this world, the images are “mantis-like invaders from Mars” and “several avatars of Tarzan.” Later, he explains that the theatre became a roller skating rink. The transformation of space is common in places struggling to survive. In Gibb’s world, the theater turns into a roller skating rink – in my world, the single movie theatre found in my tiny hometown was turned into a hardware store before it was finally torn down. Other stories can be found in such poems as “The Play of Memory of Childhood Spaces,” where a narrator remembers a class trip to St. Anthony’s Chapel in Pittsburgh, or in “Voice-Over,” where the narrator recounts working different shifts in the mills when he “never got used to eating dinner/First thing in the morning, heading to work/At bedtime.”
Clearly, the narrator is present in many of these poems, as if drawing from personal memory, but other poems reflect more historical memory, taking their inspiration from photos and works of arts. For instance, in “Homestead, ca 1929, Oil on Canvas,” the poet describes a John Kane painting where “Homestead/Is crowded rows of houses/Steel mills billowing/identical plumes of smoke.” The first lines may not be especially picturesque, but later, the poem captures the artist at work, “painting scenes on the sides of boxcars during the lunchbreaks/at work.” The final lines in this poem are a commentary on what is to come for this world, as the “slurry is just right” because the economy is “about to tank as if in another country.” In another poem, “Worker, Steel Mill,” Gibb focuses on the human being seen in a 1955 photograph by W. Eugene Smith, by explaining that at first, he is “anonymous in those glare-filled goggles.” Later, in the poem, however, there is praise for this man who is “garbed/to be garbed in fire” and who works for “weeks have been divided into shifts” all because “of the cost of production.”
In spite of my love of story and image, my favorite poem is one that interrogates etymology, echoing the title of the collection. In “Pittsburghese” the poet explores the word jaggers which is “vernacular for brambles.” Jaggers are thorns, and if one is caught in jaggers, it is painful, but it is very possible to lift the thorns away. Still, there are the ones that “splintered beneath your skin” that are the most painful, even when the jagger is removed. There is a strong metaphor here: pain may be left behind, even when the source of that pain is removed, but resilience stands. And with this resilience is some kind of hope for a less painful future. It’s this type of hope that is found in every poem in this collection – even those poems that recall painful pasts.
In the preface to this collection, Anita Skeen, Wheelbarrow Books Series Editor, quotes Thomas Wolfe by saying “You can’t go home again.” She explains, “I would argue that in poems and in memory, you can.” Skeen goes on to say that the images remind her of her childhood home located near Charleston, West Virginia. Anyone who grew up in the Rust Belt will be reminded of home, and perhaps inspired to write about that home through the lens of history, memory, and image.
Karen J. Weyant‘s poems and essays have been published in Chautauqua, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Fourth River, Lake Effect, Rattle, River Styx, Slipstream, and Whiskey Island. The author of two poetry chapbooks, her first full-length collection is Avoiding the Rapture. She is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. She lives, reads, and writes in Warren, Pennsylvania.
Rust Belt Girl 