Baldwin High School Alumna Jan Beatty ’70 Provokes, Escapes in Poetry

Jan Beatty speaks softly, a Harley Davidson leather jacket wrapped around her shoulders, tinted purple glasses and a different vibrant ring for each finger, as she discusses the nature of poetry – its escape, crossing lines, losing control.

“The poem has to teach you where it’s going and what it wants,” she said, smiling.

This nationally renowned poet with a gentle voice uses a choice of words that often push people to feel those things that they fear most. With intense poetic themes, Beatty reveals the primal secrets and exploitations that people are quick to deny.

“Writers have obsessions,” she said. “My poems seem to be really urban – a lot of urban narratives, some drugs, sexuality, issues of gender and the adoption stuff comes in. It rotates in there, and I try to keep pushing in terms of form and content. But I probably stay with those obsessions. That’s not going to go anywhere, and I don’t want it to.”

This resident of Regent Square (a community within City of Pittsburgh limits) and director of creative writing at Carlow University travels across the country to read her poems that shoot straight to the gut. An Indiana University of Pennsylvania dropout who eventually received a degree from West Virginia University, she has defied the structure of what success and a career means with a working-class attitude.

Today, she is about three quarters of the way through her fourth published book, which has yet to receive an official title.

“I just feel like I always wrote,” Beatty said. “I won (a) poetry contest in first grade and was writing about floating away on clouds, and I feel like I still write about the same thing – escape – hopefully, a little more sophisticated but maybe not,” she said with a laugh.

Born in the Hill District area of Pittsburgh in Rosalia Foundling Home, an establishment once known as a “home for unwed mothers,” Beatty is the adopted daughter of a steelworker and grew up on Highgrove Road in .

She attended what is now known as  and eventually graduated from in 1970.

She’s not sure when she left Rosalia as a child.

“There were trees in the neighborhood yards, so I would run away and read and write – you know, bad diaries, locked diaries under the bed, breakup poems, bad poetry, all that stuff,” she said. “But it was very important to me; it was a lifeline.”

The first person in her family to go to college, Beatty said that her main goal was to “not screw it up,” as she earned a degree in social work from WVU.

After five years of working at prisons, at an abortion clinic and at other highly intense environments, she left when it all became too much and found work as a waitress.

“That really helped me a lot to get back to my writing,” Beatty said. “That was giving up on this idea of career and cultural idea of success and freed me to be a writer.”

Now a tenured professor, Beatty attended a graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh where she said that she embraced the writing community. Five years after finishing grad school, her first book, “Mad River,” was published.

“I am a big proponent of grad school,” she said. “It’s a great immersion.”

Beatty has been living in Regent Square for about 18 years and said that she has tried to move to California state three times. Her magnetism to the west is a frequent topic in recent poems, she said.

“I love Pittsburgh, and I look at it as my home base from which to depart and return,” she said. “And it’s a great home base. I just always feel like I am in the process of leaving in order to be happy.”

Over the years, Beatty’s poems have inspired everything from anger and sadness to tears and laughter from audiences across the country. In “Tipping,” Beatty draws from her years as a waitress on the instructions and etiquette of taking care of those who are serving your meals.

In “Shooter,” Beatty lists encounters with different degrees of predatory men, naming the everyday occurrences of violence against women directly and unapologetically. The shooter metaphorically returns violence with violence.

“Women struggling with issues of abuse have come up to me and said, ‘That poem is about me,’” Beatty said.

“People get mad about it. It’s still hard to cross that line.”

When the book was reviewed, a male writer trashed “Shooter” and called it “‘Jan Beatty’s Vengeful Killing List,’” she said. A professor once called the poem “hate speech.”

“Usually, when I read the poem, I say, ‘Really, I don’t want to shoot anyone; this is a metaphor,’” Beatty said with a laugh and a smile.

While she gets nervous at times reading the piece, addressing the reality of issues and violence facing women is important to Beatty.

“We don’t have to put up with it, but it’s everywhere,” she said. “And we can say, ‘No, that’s not happening today,’ and we don’t care if we piss people off.

“But there’s a lot of fear. I believe in what I write, but still it’s hard to read.

“Still, I cross that line, and usually, it has good results.”

Judith Vollmer of Regent Square is Beatty’s good friend, fellow published poet and regular reader who helps with revisions as she works on a book.

“Jan’s poetry is a dynamic bridge from backlash days against a feminist poetics toward something new and spirited,” Vollmer said. “I love her sense of place: both urban and outlier subjects are addressed in her work.

“And her way of showcasing the voices of people whose stories don’t get told any other way – hard-working people, renegades, lost wanderers – is part of her gift to contemporary American poetry.”

Vollmer went on to say that Beatty’s poems can be described as “musical-journalistic anthems.”

“I’ve been a reader and fan for two decades,” Vollmer said, “and with each new collection, Jan brings something new.”

In her next book, tentatively titled, “Sedition,” Beatty’s main themes surround machinery, trains and the west.

“A lot of west poems and death poems, some love poems and gender poems,” Beatty said. “It’s the same stuff, but the form is shifting a little bit. It’s more compressed and leaping, sort of jumpstarting the feeling and energy immediately in some of the poems.”

The poetry always dictates the journey.

“I write one poem at a time, and the poems take me somewhere that I resist,” she said. “I don’t know what I am doing, and I don’t want to know what I am doing because I feel like I would squash something.

“Ask the poem what it wants, and go with it, even if it takes you someplace you don’t want to go.”

Mad Women in the Attic is a 12-week course at Carlow that is open to all women writers and is currently attended by a range of people from ages 21 to 97. The cost to enroll is $175 for all 12 weeks. The course starts in September.

For more information, call 412-578-6346.

This article originally appeared on the Forest Hills-Regent Square Patch.