When Pittsburgh’s International Poetry Forum shut down in 2009, its fans probably assumed the venerable arts group was closed for good.
And for nearly 15 years, there was no reason to doubt that conclusion. The group’s founder, longtime Duquesne University English professor Samuel Hazo, was 81.
But last year, the Forum announced it would resume operations. And this week, the group holds its first official public event since 2009, a reading at Alphabet City by National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes, a former Pittsburgh resident.
The story of the group’s resurrection is one of a chance meeting and, not surprisingly, a love of poetry.
The Forum closed because Hazo, after running it for 43 years, was unable to secure the funding to continue its annual slate of a dozen readings by poets from around the world, as well as the Poets in the Schools program.
While Pittsburgh had other places to experience poetry in person, the Forum’s departure was a real loss. This was the group that starting in 1966 presented some 330 poets, including an anthology’s worth of eminent names, from W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton and Gwendolyn Brooks to Mary Karr, Seamus Heaney and Billy Collins, mostly at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall.
The readers over the decades included nine Nobel laureates, 28 U.S. Poets Laureate and dozens of Pulitzer Prize winners. Back in the day, the Forum also often welcomed celebrity readers, from Anthony Hopkins and James Earl Jones to Princess Grace of Monaco and Jordan’s Queen Noor.
In 2009, it looked like it was all over. But the dormant organization’s fortunes changed in 2022, after a friend introduced Hazo to Jake Grefenstette, a young scholar and South Hills native whose English teacher at Seton LaSalle High School had been a big admirer of Hazo and the Forum. That initial meeting “was in the context of sort of meeting a hero and nothing else,” said Grefenstette.
But Hazo was impressed enough to ask Grefenstette if he wanted to restart the Forum. This was just as Grefenstette was returning to the U.S. from England, where he’d earned his doctorate in philosophy of religion from the University of Cambridge. He was preparing to apply for jobs in academia.
Instead, Grefenstette said, he asked his wife, “‘Are you okay if we sort of go start-up-arts mode?’ And she was completely supportive.”
At age 96, Hazo is still writing; the former Pennsylvania poet laureate recently published a new poetry collection, “The Treachery of Luck.” (On Sept. 13, Hazo recited some of his poems at a pre-launch Forum event at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall.)
But at the Forum, he now has emeritus status, with Grefenstette, 30, as president and executive director. Grefenstette also teaches philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and is poetry editor of CMU Press.
The new season received financial support from the Elsie H. Hillman Foundation and the Grable Foundation. In terms of programming, the Forum won’t be quite picking up where it left off. Instead of a dozen readings, this new season will be a “proof of concept” with perhaps half a dozen ticketed events.
Three are currently scheduled, featuring Hayes; “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” translator Emily Wilson; and Paris Review poetry editor Srikanth Reddy.
The Forum is also resuming its programming in schools. Visiting poets will conduct workshops with students; Hayes, for instance, is booked to visit Wilmerding’s Westinghouse Arts Academy. And Grefenstette said the group plans to deploy local poets to do about 30 programs in area high schools and libraries. (The group is encouraging teachers who might want to welcome a poet to their classrooms to get in touch.)
The local poetry community is greeting the Forum’s return greeted enthusiastically.
“It left a hole when it was no longer here,” said Michael Simms, a poet and founder of Pittsburgh-based Autumn House Press.
Simms, who was one of the Forum’s Poets in the Schools and also once worked as Hazo’s assistant, said the Forum wasn’t just good at bringing in canonical poets. He also praised Hazo for booking talents like Naomi Shihab Nye and future Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney years before they were well known.
“It was the most crucial and important resource we had for years in poetry in Pittsburgh,” said poet Joan E. Bauer, co-organizer of the long-running Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series for local poets. “To see it coming back is just a joy.”
The Forum is also preparing a new series of short-form podcasts in which local poets discuss their favorite single line of poetry. Grefenstette said the initiative is an attempt to utilize short-form digital media to raise the profile of one of humanity’s oldest art forms.
“We're trying to build content that gets people excited,” he said. “So we're asking poets to talk about their favorite few lines of poetry and hoping that’s something that can usher offline deeper engagement with poetry after the episode.”
