The Ecstasy of Jan Beatty

“Sometimes, let the world of flames speak / for itself.”
— Jan Beatty, Dragstripping (2024)

A primary byproduct of ore-smelting is the mixture of oxides and silicon dioxide known as slag. Heaped into giant conical mountains alongside industrial sites, these otherworldly piles are known as slag heaps. Appearing as granulated pyramids of blast furnace refuse, slag heaps can include an assortment of copper, nickel, and zinc removed as non-ferrous material during the refinement of what will become steel. For those raised in industrial regions, such as Pittsburgh, slag heaps were once a common site along rivers such as the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio. These sooty remnants of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation or the Carrie Blast Furnaces are the height of the great Indian mounds that dotted this landscape centuries ago, but rather than a verdant green, these heaps are the color of an overcast Western Pennsylvania sky. They are incongruously beautiful and have a way of getting into the lungs and blood of residents—both literally and metaphorically. As Jan Beatty writes in her raw and gorgeous hybrid work American Bastard: A Memoir (2021), “I am the earth and metal/the slagheap and the ore/my blood fierce yellow.”

Beatty is, along with her friend Judith Vollmer, among the most influential forces in Pittsburgh’s vibrant poetry scene. In her seventh full-length collection Dragstripping (2024), she writes that she is “attached to dirt: to the grit / of stones, pulverized metal from / the slag heap.” It’s consummate Beatty, a paean to the grimy and bygone version of her now gentrifying hometown. “I was born in a steel mill,” she writes in Dragstripping, as remarkable a line of poetry in its Whitmanesque chutzpa as any I’ve read this year. Since her first chapbook Ravenous in 1995, Beatty has steadfastly eschewed boring poetic trends. Allergic to irony, smugness, and the onanistic experimentalism of the academic avant-garde, she has instead forged a vernacular as strong as steel: blunt, honest, and eviscerating. Having previously chaired the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she led the influential feminist writing group Madwomen in the Attic, Beatty is in many ways a latter-day punk. As Ed Ochester, her former professor at the University of Pittsburgh, once said, “Nobody has a better sense of the colloquial American idiom. Nobody among her contemporaries writes better poems about urban working-class life.”

Having herself worked variously as a waitress, an instructor in a maximum-security prison, a social worker, a counselor in an abortion clinic, and a distinguished professor emeritus at Carlow, Beatty has been sounding her barbaric yawp for three decades. True to Ochester’s contention, Beatty’s verse exists in a nexus of exemplary technique and don’t-fuck-with-me pugilism. A poem titled “Dear American Poetry” from The Switching/Yard (2013) addresses that fussy annual anthology: “Your sonnet is impotent, / and I / have a hard-on,” followed by a (hilarious) string of italicized iambic pentameter, scansion marks and all, composed entirely of a derogatory word for women’s genitalia and similar language describing the genitalia of a poorly endowed man. “Best American Poetry, I’m bored to death — is anyone / alive out there?” It’s rare for this sort of call to come from inside the house. Any number of contemporary underground poets might share the same sentiments, but Beatty recalls an earlier countercultural pantheon.

Born in 1952 at the Rosalia Foundling Asylum and Maternity Hospital in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Beatty was adopted at approximately one year old by a woman and her steelworker husband. “My adopted mother and I never had one good moment,” Beatty writes in American Bastard, although her father was a loving ally. Beatty’s work explores the intricacies of the initial trauma of being given away. Much of her memoir recounts her awkward meetings with her birth mother during adulthood, and of discovering the identity of her father, a Canadian hockey player who won the Stanley Cup three times. Beatty’s sense of rootlessness—she didn’t know her original birth name until she was in her 30s—is why she returns to place as a fixture in her work.

“Place became a way of locating things for me, when travelling a lot, or going to the mountains, going to the West, where I feel drawn, even if I’ll never leave Pittsburgh,” she says.

I first met Beatty on the same day I’d scheduled an outpatient electroencephalogram, a procedure that required me to cover my scalp in electrodes hooked into a pack that I carried around my shoulder. We were at Stay Gold Books, where several local writers had been convened by the director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures. Because I wasn’t allowed to drive, Beatty kindly allowed me to hitch a ride in her Chevy. Talking to her feels like being with a Pittsburgh prophet, a blues-shouting country-and-western punk-rocker, who writes in The Switching/Yard: “Wherever I am, I’m filled with sediment: / with tough, dirty Pittsburgh / where the mountains of black rock & / half mills are carapaces.”

The working-class city she was raised in is central to Beatty’s voice. “I love Pittsburgh, love the grit,” she tells me at 61C Café on Murray Avenue in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. “I miss the steel, miss the way the mills look, miss the fire.” She laments that the recent changes in Pittsburgh—tech companies rising on former industrial sites—is its own variety of trauma. Still, she celebrates the arrival of new transplants and the city’s burgeoning progressivism (while emphasizing that there remains a long way to go), as well as its growing arts and literary scene. Regardless of the role that Pittsburgh plays in her work, it’s hardly the only place that animates her verse. Regions as disparate as Canada, the American Southwest, and California also appear. “I resist being called a Pittsburgh poet,” she says. “That sounds like a local poet, which I’m not.” Even if the city remains a touchstone, there is really only one major issue that motivates her: “I believe in women more than I believe in anything.”

In an unpublished statement written for her publisher, the University of Pittsburgh Press, Beatty explains that the title Dragstripping “comes from a range of meanings of the words, ‘drag’ and ‘stripping’: the drag of walking through life without an identity, the drag of being a woman in a culture that continues to challenges one’s rights, the drag and complication of gender in a drag club, the literal drag strip of racing cars.” The word dragstripping encompasses both pain and pleasure, control and liberation—as do many of Beatty’s poems. That she is often critiqued as bracing or raw speaks to the too-often invisible omnipresence of misogyny. An italicized poem which appears as an epigraph in Dragstripping (and which Beatty debated about placing in that position) exemplifies her concerns. She writes how she was “half-aborted by my mother’s hands / and a coat hanger / But, who cares? / It’s one small almost death, in the many / deaths.” She effectively dedicates the collection to

    The women killed and never found: 
the women killed in their own homes 
then disposed of; the women killed by 
boyfriends, husbands, partners, strangers: 
buried in the dirt of this country—

There are other ways of erasing women as well, not least of all within literary institutions. Beatty recounts incidents of rampant sexism from her graduate school days and her early career—in the 1990s, not all that long ago. At one university, a senior male professor mocked a call for submissions from queer writers of color, to which Beatty replied that his attitude (as an editor nonetheless) was precisely why so many LGBTQ poets prepare a “queer” manuscript and a “straight” manuscript. She recalls a graduate class in which the professor began by saying, “Today we’ll neuter Adrienne Rich.” When she pushed back, the professor finally responded, in true New Critical fashion, that when it comes to verse, “It’s simply words on a page.” Beatty retorted, “Well, not to me.”

For Beatty, poetry is neither intellectual exercise nor fodder for the tenure file, but an incantatory statement of inner life—a protest, a jeremiad, a prophecy, a manifesto. A true working-class daughter of Pittsburgh, Beatty asks in “The Drawbridge”: “Didn’t you ever want to tear something down? / Smash it to make the parts talk their battered talk: // the stabbing edges & burning colors, the love compressed / in the steel beam & the raging yellow flame?”

In “California,” Beatty posits that “Everyone’s simple sorrow / writes a book a day — fills the hearts / of us with such pathos, bravery — & / then the small cruelties — / How do we speak to each other?” Yet her verse isn’t just diagnostic but prescriptive as well, for there are moments in which she intimates the possibility of a better world within otherwise prosaic moments. In “To the Woman at the Laramie Airport,” she recounts how a stranger assisted her in a dark parking lot, describing the small interaction as “Two women at night in the night / of the world. She saw me with no bearings, / she saw me afraid, she stepped up and / loved a stranger. She didn’t have to / do any of it.” Here is an instance of fellowship, a communion, between humans. If not paradise, it’s at least a shadow of it.  

As the kind of critic that I am, I can’t help but read the ecstatic into Beatty’s narratives, although, as she cautions, its presence in her work shouldn’t be interpreted as gauzy “spiritual verse” or straightjacketed “religious verse.” Even though a strong feeling of something otherworldly might appear in her work, Beatty in no way believes in a traditional God. “I don’t want anything to do with religion, or the transcendent, it’s a whole lot of bullshit,” she tells me. The traumas enacted by organized religion, particularly the Catholic Church of her youth, are evident in her work. In American Bastard, she describes how, when she finally received a letter from her birth mother on chintzy stationary, it included a golden crucifix, the dead body of Christ hardly a substitute for all that needed to be said. And when Beatty later met her birth mother for the first time, she was gifted a plastic bottle of Holy Water from Lourdes.

Beatty’s examination of organized religion interrogates the long history of violence against women that ecclesiastical and clerical culture has enacted. In American Bastard, Beatty writes that in the second grade she “went to Mass every day because of fear of death. Instead of recess—Mass. The blood. The killing, the blame for all the many sins, the black mark on your soul.” Such sentiments posed certain difficulties in Beatty’s position when she taught at Carlow, a historically women’s college operated by the Sisters of Mercy. When she wrote a poem for the inauguration of the school's new president in 2014, for example, she refused to sit on stage with David Zubik, the infamously reactionary bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The school administration honored her position. Catholic or not, Carlow’s status as a historically women’s school was always most important to Beatty.

I told Beatty that the reading she gave with Richard Blanco as part of the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures Poets Aloud series this past September felt, for me, like the kind of experience some people say they have when they go to church. Despite her skepticism toward the numinous and the transcendent, she was gracious with the comparison, and it’s fair to say that Beatty’s poetry does express a variety of the ecstatic, albeit on her own terms. “There is ecstasy on planet earth,” she says, “in bodies joining, in dreams and desire.” This is an estimably materialist paradise, no need for God at all. “Now what is holy?” Beatty asks in The Switching/Yard. “Nothing, same as before,” though I’d argue that then nothing need be unholy either. Maybe more than transcendence, what Beatty’s poetry envisions is utopian possibility, an imagining of future political, social, and cultural transformations. In Dragstripping’s title poem, Beatty describes a self-possessed stripper who dances by “jerking to one side, head bent, / hair covers her face, breasts large and moving, / her thickness: / Wet with boysweat between her legs, / a stripshot across a pitchblack stage, / flash of a woman running her show.” There is, despite itself, an ecstasy in this act—if not a grace—for as Beatty writes, “I don’t believe in salvation, but / look at her body stripping.”

This is a prosody of materiality, sensuality, and physicality: no spirits but bodies, and their combination and recombination. Often, this can be indistinguishable from the promises of an ecstatic faith, albeit in these circumstances one that actually delivers on its promises. In “Sanctified,” dedicated to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the midcentury blues-shouter and pioneering electric guitarist, Beatty secularizes the singer’s gospel-inflected performance while divinizing the rest of us. She writes,

    I love your high- 
heeled guitar playing, the way they said you railed 
your white Les Paul Custom like a tommy gun: 
gospel-wild and showing the men how it’s done—

The language is evocatively sexual, and there is an encomium to Tharpe’s own self-possessed playing, her “dress breathing red flowers / hugging your full-size body.” The speaker doesn’t “want to be redeemed,” but in the gospel performance itself, “hearing your soul-heavy voice surge . . . I’m saying what you always knew — / that real is real” Despite there being no happy endings, Tharpe and her fellow blues shouters remain “scorching, / sanctified.” Even if there is no heaven, there is still a way to sanctify ourselves in a world where only the real is real.  

These utopian intimations, abundantly physical, are what make hope both possible and necessary in Beatty’s poems. Hers is not a poetics of the spirit but of the body. In “Blood Ring,” she writes that she “cut a tunnel through my father’s onyx ring, / cut the diamond out & stone-fired a garnet / in the center,” but she “asked the jeweler not to clean / the band & bridge so my father’s DNA / could bleed into my skin.” If there is anything sacramental in Beatty’s poetry, it’s this: we all have bodies, capable of both pleasure and pain, comfort and cruelty. And if there is communion, it’s to be found in those connections, where the wearing of her beloved father’s ring, years after he has passed, serves as a form of reverence and embrace. There is a similar singing of the body electric in The Switching/Yard, in which Beatty describes the “body of sturdy days; body of spasms, scrawny, familiar / body of fair play, limitations and reminders; aching / that interferes . . . body of arousal and the collapsing bridge: / shadow of the architecture that was my life.”

A veritable liturgy, this passage is an abstract blazon of the body in its excesses and constraints, a wild and intoxicating reminder of the physical rendered in language that acknowledges our finitude. In a place where people live on developments constructed atop slag heaps, it’s impossible not to understand the crushing grandeur of the physical. In “The Drawbridge,” Beatty notes that the “bodies of the steelworkers / weld into one — // & the city of questions sleeps — / & the steel flakes in the lungs speak / & the outside law falls null & void —.” The intermingling of the bodily and something else, something wilder and bigger than any of us, is even used to describe Beatty’s own conception in American Bastard. Despite irreverently writing that “I was the immaculate cum-shot,” she also imagines the moment of her conception in “Ghostdaddys”: “I hope the sex was ravenous . . . I hope there were slats of light everywhere / to see my star on the other side.”  

Beatty is a poet for whom authenticity, that ever-difficult term, is neither a pose nor a social media marketing gambit. She writes honest poems in a manner that seems scarcely practiced anymore, or at least scarcely published in widely read venues. Separate from the academy, Beatty argues that “poetry needs more openness to community voices and all ages, especially women’s voices. It’s still too controlled by men, even if people don’t think so.” This piece is the first extended critical essay on Beatty to appear on the Poetry Foundation’s website, despite her three decades’ worth of influential and award-winning work. (Poetry magazine has published her poems.) That her work can still be read as radical, even shocking, speaks not to their content but to her being indispensable. Beatty identifies that which bedevils a culture—in some ways, a prophetic vocation. She also gestures toward a more expansive world, which is maybe even more important.

In this liberating task of expanding human connection there are poetic touchstones, certain names that appear and reappear in Beatty’s work, often musicians: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Then there are her contemporaries and the poets of the generation before her: Ochester, Vollmer, Wanda Coleman, Diane Glancy, and Etheridge Knight, from whom she learned the practice of including slash-lines in her work. Finally, there are the younger generations of poets working in her stead from whom Beatty draws both succor and inspiration, often friends such as Bruce Snider, D.A. Powell, C. Dale Young, and Iris Jamahl Dunkle. If there is a single gospel in Beatty’s work, it’s a gospel of poetry’s ability to organize and explain, restore and bolster, perhaps even (my word) sanctify. Beatty uses poetry to speak on not just her own behalf, but also for those disappeared women to whom she dedicates her writing, for women’s voices in the classroom and the street, in the barroom and the shelter. Such verse isn’t just a description of life, but, when written in a certain way, can actually be life. As Beatty asks of us all, “who wants a watered- / down heart?”