“Pittsburgh is a poetry city just like it’s a jazz city,” Michael Wurster says, but that hasn’t always been the case. The Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, the organization Wurster co-founded and has led for the past 50 years, is partly to thank for solidifying that identity.
Founded in 1974 by Wurster, Dieter Weslowski, Lloyd Johnson, Vic Coccimiglio, and JW Jansen, the PPE aimed to cultivate an appreciation for the art form and bridge the gap between established poets and those in the broader community.
Fifty years after its founding, the PPE remains a valuable source of learning and community for the city’s poets. In addition to workshops, PPE supports a monthly open mic at the South Side Presbyterian Church, curates a quarterly reading series at Bantha Tea House, and has published several anthologies, most recently 50: Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange 1974-2024, a collection celebrating the group’s recent milestone.
Other reading series originated or are closely connected to PPE, including the Hemingway summer reading series, currently co-directed by PPE member Joan Bauer.
Wurster was a poet long before he helped to start the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange. As the son of a jazz singer, he grew up surrounded by creative people and learned to love reading at an early age.
“Most poets, when they’re very young, they realize that they’re in a world which is either completely evil or completely nuts,” Wurster says. In his case, growing up in a dysfunctional family sent him seeking a creative outlet. At 14, Wurster landed his first publications — a pair of holiday stories published by the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star in 1954. As a teenager he worked with his high school’s literary magazine, something he continued in college when he served as the poetry editor for The Hornbook at Dickinson College.
In the mid-‘60s, Wurster moved to Pittsburgh and got involved with the city’s jazz scene. His attention shifted to poetry in the 1970s, but his love for other art forms never faded. As he says, “Part of practicing for me is movies and jazz … Jazz music has influenced my poetry in terms of rhythm. Film has influenced by poetry in terms of image and moving from one image to another.”
He has been prolific in that practice and estimates that he’s written over 800 poems “…that I claim are good poems, which means there are about 2,000 others that will probably never see the light of day,” he adds.
He produced four collections, the most recent of which, Even Then, was released in 2019 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Wurster also contributed to the development of local poets as an educator. He taught poetry at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for 17 years, and served as the director of poetry programs at Lion Walk Performing Arts Center, the Rider Cultural Center, and the South Side’s Carson Street Gallery.
Now 84, Wurster, in addition to running the PPE, continues to write and read his poetry. His upcoming readings include an early Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange reunion on April 19, 2025 with fellow co-founder Dieter Weslowski and long-time PPE member Mary Tisera.
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2024 and Pittsburgh’s People of the Year (2024).
