My hometown... where sites like this are not uncommon. Unfortunately I didn't have the right kind of camera or film to get everything into this photo. Oh, yes, there was more. (And notice the brick -- even it is black and gold.)
Football season officially started last week, with the Steelers winning, of course, 28-14. However, this house was fully decked out before the pre-season even started. Such is life in the beautiful, exciting, boring, ethnic, aging, always renewing, former milltown, still-culturally-milltown, of the Rust Belt, and it is amusing, entertaining, and a sociological, cultural-anthropological gem. And no researcher or observer could even start to understand it without taking a really thorough look at its most rabid and most unifying and perhaps most central phenomenon: the city's relationship with its beloved Steelers.
'Strange post for a poetry site? Well, yes, but this poet grew up in Pittsburgh. And contradictory or odd as it might seem, along with my heroes such as Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mikhael Baryshnikov, James Madison, Martha Graham, Erik Erickson, Frederick Douglass, Clarence Darrow, Frida Kahlo, and Subcommidante Marcos, are names like Mean Joe Greene, Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, Franco Harris, Heinz Ward, and Troy Palamalu. Go Steelers, and cliche as it is, you're poetry in motion.
2 comments:
OH, Pittsburgh...she said wistfully.
I love that damned city.
The only place I've been as happy or happier is in the deep woods of New Hampshire when I was a kid.
Oh, Pittsburgh.
Can I say you are a catch? No disrespect just cool. Rare is a smart, pretty, artistic girl who also appreciates football. Don't mean to be forward or anything. Just wish there were more PEOPLE out there who aren't just stereotypes. Just saying lots of unexpected fresh stuff here. Keep up the good blog and the spunk.
Paul Bellis
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