The Wurster Interviews, Part 15: The Advancing Years of PPE

Read previous installments:     Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5      Part 6      Part 7      Part 8      Part 9      Part 10      Part 11      Part 12      Part 13      Part 14

After City Books

So at this point, we needed to find another location for the workshop. In the meantime, we had begun a monthly poetry book discussion group at Borders North (Borders being a national bookstore chain). The discussion group had actually been started by a bookstore employee named Brian, the community relations director for the store. Once we found out about this, I and some other PPE members got involved. Specifically including Joseph Karasek.

We'll digress a bit here. Joe Karasek is a brilliant poet. He was from New York, a violinist. He had studied with Stefan Wolpe, as did a later PPE member, Dr. Gene Hirsch. Karasek had turned to poetry due to arthritis. The first time I met Joe Karasek was at a reading in Shadyside in an art gallery run by a woman named Lily Chang. When I first observed Joe and chatted with him a little bit, he seemed to me to be a wise guy. He does have a quick wit. He was sitting there pecking away at a laptop computer prior to the reading, which was by Ellen Smith. Joe studied with Ellen at the Center for the Arts that summer. Then he studied with me in the fall. When he started in my class, he seemed quite proud of the fact that while he had started a poem in Ellen's class, he had never finished a poem. I guaranteed him that by the end of the term he would have finished a poem, which he did Joe and I became close friends as well as colleagues.

Brian later had a falling out with his employers and left the store. They asked me to take over the discussion group, which I did. The discussion group has continued since that time, although we are now at the Coffee Tree, a coffeehouse in Shadyside.

The format of the discussion group is that the members take turns choosing the book to be read and discussed. We've read a great variety of poets, from Robert Duncan and Charles Olson to Maxine Kumin, Evan Boland, and local poets such as Ed Ochester and Jan Beatty. I remember one especially interesting evening when Joe Karasek and I, for whatever reason, were the only attendees. The book was Merwin's The Vixen. We spent almost two hours rolling around in only two of the poems. It was a terrific experience.

I find that no matter how much I think I know about a book or a poet going in, after reading and discussing the book of poems I find that I know so much more. Sometimes we'll read a book that I don't like, but after the reading and discussion I am won over.

After we left City Books, we had to find another venue for the workshop. This was made difficult by the fact that the workshop normally ran from 8 p.m. to 10 or sometimes 11 p.m. For a while, we conducted the workshop at a Panera store, but they changed their hours. There were smaller satellite workshops in people's homes, but the open workshop frequently attracted too large a crowd to use someone's home as the site. One of the pluses of our workshop is that it is in the evening. Several years after the founding of PPE, the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop was founded. They meet every other Saturday afternoon. The Pittsburgh Poetry Society, which had actually been in business since the 1920s, re-emerged. They meet once a month on a Friday afternoon at a restaurant. Their format is quite different from ours or the Squirrel Hill group's. So between the three groups and other fugitive or short-lived or underground groups, plus the university programs, everyone's need can be served — from those who want to attend an evening workshop to those who require an afternoon workshop to those who want to get an MFA in creative writing and attend school full-time.

In the nick of time, we found Brentwood.

Next in issue 19: Brentwood