HOMESTEAD, PENNSYLVANIA — In recognition of National Poetry Month, the Battle of Homestead Foundation presents An Evening of Working Class Poetry (and Music) featuring four local poets and two musicians.
The program takes place Thursday, Apr. 11 from 7:00-9:00 p.m. at the Pump House, 880 E. Waterfront Drive, Munhall. Admission is free with pre-registration at https://tinyurl.com/3p8esknu.
Poets Robert Walicki, Robert Gibb, Jason Irwin and Paola Corso will read from their published work, with musicians kelsey jumper and Danny Rectenwald contributing songs celebrating social activism.
The reading focuses on poetry created from the experiences of Pittsburgh’s bluecollar workers past and present, says event organizer Robert Walicki. “It’s poetry that is deeply personal but also emphasizes social awareness within the context and history of the labor industry in Pittsburgh.”
In the early U.S. labor movement, workers and their causes were typically excluded from mainstream media, notes John Haer, president of the Battle of Homestead Foundation, a Pittsburgh nonprofit that connects Western Pennsylvania’s labor history with current issues involving economics, environment, healthcare, racial justice and the future of work.
“To promote their cause, workers used poetry, music and art that couldn’t be censored or corporately controlled,” says Haer. “Even today, the arts are essential to expressing the mission and identity of labor movements in every part of the world.”
The venue for An Evening of Working Class Poetry (and Music) has its own special significance in Pittsburgh’s working class history.
The Pump House was the strategic focal point of the bloody 1892 battle that saw Homestead steel workers and townspeople fight strikebreakers arriving to shut down the Carnegie steel mills and exclude unions. Today, the building is a National Register of Historic Places owned and maintained by Rivers of Steel and a popular stop on the Great Allegheny Passage hike-and-bike trail.
While the Battle of Homestead received extensive international newspaper coverage at the time, the union perspective — what John Haer calls “the people’s history” — was told largely by poems and street ballads composed by anonymous workers and circulated through the community.
“There were scores of powerful poems and songs that came out of the battle and its aftermath,” he says. “An Evening of Working Class Poetry (and Music) is going to showcase that working class tradition today.”
Featured Poets and Musicians:
Robert Walicki’s work has appeared in over 50 journals, including Pittsburgh City Paper, Fourth River, Chiron Reviewand Evening Street Review. A two time Pushcart Prize and a Best of The Net nominee, Robert’s latest full length collection, Fountain, was released from Main Street Rag Press.
Robert Gibb is the author of Sightlines (Poetry Press, 2021), his thirteenth full-length poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Prize Americana for Poetry. Other books include Among Ruins (Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017), After (Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for 2016) and The Origins of Evening (Norton, 1997), a National Poetry Series selection. He has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry, a Pushcart Prize and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei and Strousse Awards. A 2023 book, Pittsburghese, won Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Michigan State University Press.
Jason Irwin is the author of three full-length poetry collections and two chapbooks, most recently The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020). In 2022 he was a Zoeglossia Fellow and part of the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Project. His nonfiction has been published in Santa Ana Review, Panorama, The Catholic Worker and City of Asylum’s Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry and Prose Project. He grew up in Dunkirk, NY, and now lives in Pittsburgh.
Paola Corso is the author of seven poetry and fiction books set in her native Pittsburgh where her Southern Italian immigrant family worked in the steel mills. Her books include Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, The Laundress Catches Her Breath (winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing), Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing (winner of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award), Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories (Sons of Italy National Book Club Selection), Giovanna’s 86 Circles and Other Stories (John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist on the Pennsylvania School Librarian Association’s Top 40 Young Adult Fiction List) and Death by Renaissance with archival and original photographs by George Thomas Mendel. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Women’s Review of Books, Writer’s Digest, U.S. Catholic, The Progressive and numerous anthologies.
kelsey jumper is a multidisciplinary performing artist grateful to have worked with well-celebrated Pittsburgh theater companies including Pittsburgh Public Theater, Quantum Theater, Bricolage Production Company, Carnegie Mellon University Drama, Barebones Productions and Pittsburgh CLO. She’s been featured alongside the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, regularly at the Honky-Tonk Jukebox and with local bands including Ames Harding & the Mirage and Watererer. She’s played big league venues like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, MoMA, The Studio Museum of Harlem and The Shed. Kelsey was granted the opportunity to bring the words of MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine to life under Ms. Rankine’s direction in White Card. Kelsey has held residencies at Kelly Strayhorn Theater and The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, been commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art and received support from The Opportunity Fund, Advancing Black Arts, Cultural Trust and #notwhitecollective. She’s also choreographed for Point Park University, her alma mater, where she studied Musical Theater. She’s grateful to tether together an existence – a practice of expansion through learning and expression.
Danny Rectenwald is a composer and guitarist spanning classical, jazz, rock, Irish, bluegrass, tango and folk. He has two solo albums on Misra Records – Samadhi and Canyon – and has performed with Favorite Band, Bastard Bearded Irishmen, Robert Randolph & the Family Band, Jim Avett, Michael Glabicki, Jim Donovan, Liz Berlin of Rusted Root, The Clarks, Donnie Iris and The Commonheart. He has performed on the soundtrack for the mobile app Little Pizzeriacreated by Orta Interactive Studio, performed and composed music for the kids’ TV show Hello Humans and played on the Mid-Atlantic Emmy-nominated show Live from Nied’s Hotel.
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