Iconoscope: New and Selected Poems

pitt poetry series

Ed Ochester, EDITOR

iconoscope

new and selected poems

Peter Oresick

EDITED BY Judith Vollmer

INTRODUCTION BY Lawrence Joseph

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2015, Peter Oresick

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6380-6

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6380-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8120-6 (electronic)

For Stephanie Flom

and for our children

William, Jake, and David

Contents

Introduction by Lawrence Joseph

Under the Carpathians

I.

Reverse Painting on Glass (Kandinsky)

The Inspector

Lviv, or Lwów

Ruthenia

The Meeting

A Message about Numbers

Morning, Allegheny River

The Interview

How Dickens Happens

Pastoral

When Icons Weep

II.

That Summer

Angelism

Therapy

My Father with Pulp Fiction, 1935

My Father Who Art in Heaven

Franklin

I Can’t Hear

Autumn Evening at the Window with Brushes

She Whispers

III.

To a Museum Guard at Shift Change

Origins of the Ruthenian

At the Crypt of the Church of Our Lady of the Veil

When in 2009 the G20 Summit Convened in Pittsburgh

What the Hermit Zosimus Said

Sister Rosaire Kopczenski Enters the Religious Life

The Old Anarchy

IV.

Paper Plates

I Hiked the Carpathians

Fired//On My 49th Birthday

Mary, Mary

My Mother’s Pirohi

This the Very Coinage of My Brain

I Love to Sleep Curled

The Ruthenian Lamb

from Warhol-O-Rama (2008)

Andy Warhol for Gods Who Must Be Crazy

Andy Warhol for Short Attention Spans

Andy Warhol for Catholics

Andy Warhol for the FBI

Googlism for Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol for the Taj Warhol

Andy Warhol for the Widow of Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol for Undergraduates

Andy Warhol for the Village Voice Classifieds, 1966

Andy Warhol for Familiar Quotations

Warhol, Andy for Indexers

from Definitions (1990)

The Story of Glass

One of Many Bars in Ford City, Pennsylvania

My Father

Family Portrait, 1933

Landscape with Unemployed, 1934

The Annual PPG Pensioners’ Picnic

After the Deindustrialization of America, My Father Enters Television Repair

The Social Impact of Corporate Disinvestment

Toward the Heaven of Full Employment

Now

Tolstoy in Heaven

Agnes McGurrin

The Jeweler

At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh

Pleasure

About My Son and Hands

Poem for Hamid

After the Movement

Extreme Unction

Old Shevchenko

An American Peace

Acknowledgments

Introduction / Lawrence Joseph

Peter Oresick’s Iconoscope is poetry of the highest order. Its breadth and depth of ambition; its sharp-edged, tough-minded intelligence; its intense moral, emotional, and spiritual sensibility; and its acute social consciousness and imaginatively compelling power, all create a body of work virtually singular in American poetry. Oresick’s poems are recurrent testimonies to the fact that poetry, in its fullest sense, has to do with vision. Grounded on the entirety of existence and on an experience of the real worlds around and within us, Iconoscope strikes deeply into poetry’s eternal truths.

The word iconoscope (from the Greek εἰκών [eikōn], image, and σκοπεῖν [skopein], to see) entered our language in the 1920s. The iconoscope—invented by Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian-born engineer at the Westinghouse Electric laboratories in Pittsburgh—was the first workable camera in early electronic television. Iconoscope aptly describes Oresick’s work. Each poem is a complex object that portrays and allows us to see, in language, images (in the broadest sense) through the determining personality of the poet.

This person—the person, the poet, who speaks to us in Iconoscope—was born in 1955 in Ford City, Pennsylvania, a small mill town along the Allegheny River in the western part of the state near Pittsburgh. His grandparents, Ruthenian immigrants, were glassworkers, as were his parents. He grew up in a house three blocks from the factory gate. Baptized in the Catholic Church’s Byzantine Rite, he lived one block from each of the town’s four Catholic churches: Ruthenian–Ukrainian, Slovak, Polish, and German. Upon graduation from the University of Pittsburgh—where he studied literature as an undergraduate and then received a master of fine arts degree, and where he met his wife, Stephanie Flom—he taught for several years in Pittsburgh public schools, then worked as a full-time father to Stephanie’s and his three sons. He then worked in senior positions in literary, scholarly, and technical publishing for over twenty years, while editing two major poetry anthologies that revolved around blue-collar America and the concept of labor in poetry—Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life and For a Living: The Poetry of Work. He has also taught literature, writing, and courses on publishing at Emerson College, Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he lectured on publishing in China, Kazakhstan, and Eastern Europe for the United States Agency for International Development. Furthermore, he is an expert painter in the tradition of Byzantine iconography. Family, ethnic history and identity, industrial work, Catholicism, the geographies of western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, immigration and migration, and war-torn histories, including the war on American labor by American capitalism, define and determine Iconoscope’s wide-ranging vision.

Definitions, Oresick’s first collection, lays the groundwork. There are poems of a father who after four years of combat has nothing to say about it, trembling in his sleep, the poet’s mother says, for the next four years. A father who tends a glass furnace, four times on strike, to achieve, by the year the poet was a one-year-old, a few extra cents in his hourly