The poet John Dorsey was recently diagnosed with advanced basal cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer which required major surgery. Just prior to the operation, Mr. Dorsey quietly published “Cancer Songs,” a slim chapbook of twelve short poems confronting his new reality and his very real fears for his own mortality. His “Cancer Song #2” opens with these spare lines, “this is the song of myself / i’d thought i’d never sing.”

John Dorsey was born with cerebral palsy on a military base in Hawaii 46 years ago. His father was from Irwin, his mother a girl from Penn Hills. “They split the difference,” Mr. Dorsey laughs, “and I grew up in Greensburg.” He has lived a peripatetic life that has taken him from Hempfield Area Senior High School to Philadelphia, Toledo, Sheboygen and Belle, Mo., where he currently makes his home and where he served as the city’s first poet laureate.

In between, he’s logged a lot of miles on the road. By his recollection, there was one point where he was giving around a hundred readings a year all over the country.

Mr. Dorsey is a prolific writer. As of this year, over ninety collections of his poetry have been published in the United States and abroad. His work is lean and unadorned. It is concerned with blue collar themes, life below the poverty line and existence on the margins of contemporary American society. Mr. Dorsey’s poems exist in a world “where upward mobility / meant spaghetti instead of ramen / shared with a punk rock girl / on at least half a dozen / off brand antipsychotics” (“Degrees of Gray on Ashland Ave”).

Don Wentworth published The Lilliput Review, a magazine which spotlighted short form poems, for close to thirty years. Speaking with him recently near his Lawrenceville home, Mr. Wentworth observed, “As someone who has followed and participated in the small press movement over the last 40 plus years, I feel John is one of the most important influencers of grassroots poetry.”

Karen Lillis, who owns Karen’s Book Row in Oakland, agrees. “[Mr.] Dorsey’s work is greatly admired in the underground poetry scene, from New Jersey to the Great Lakes to the Midwest to San Francisco. John is one of a small handful of underground poets I know of who stay on the move, doing readings and meeting the poetry community across several states, and keeping poetry — although there is almost zero money in poetry — as an absolute priority. John lives this way because, it seems, he is more driven by poetry than he is afraid of poverty.”

At the age of thirteen Mr. Dorsey had his first real encounter with poetry. “My aunt gave me a copy of ‘The Treasury of American Poetry’ by Nancy Sullivan. I remember reading Hart Crane’s ‘Black Tambourine’ and crying.” Mr. Crane’s poem speaks of “the world’s closed door,” a theme that would animate much of Mr. Dorsey’s own work. He began haunting the Walden Books at the Greengate Mall reading as much as he could get his hands on. Around 1994-95, Mr. Dorsey started spending time at the Teatro Cafe in downtown Greensburg where he encountered, for the first time, live poets who gave readings of their own work.

It’s here Mr. Dorsey came to a realization similar to that described by Galway Kinnell, “Soon I understood that poetry could be transcendent, hymnlike, a cosmic song, and yet remain idolatrously attached to the creatures and things of our world.” Or as Jack Spicer wrote, “Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else.”

Local poet Jason Baldinger says of Mr. Dorsey, “There is a celebration in his poems of working class life; you can see the rust belt ribs of his growing up near Jeanette in his poems. The poems are not so much sad as they are an elegy for outsiders in dead end places. There is always hope and grace in his words”.

“i think about what they’ll take from me / & everything we leave behind / & just hope the poems / are the last thing / they bury in the dirt.,” Mr. Dorsey writes in “Cancer Song #10.” Surgery took blood and bone from Mr. Dorsey. It also took his left eye.

I asked Mr. Dorsey about the sacrifices he’s made by prioritizing writing poetry over more typical pursuits such as job security, a regular paycheck and reliable health care. “If you have the opportunity in life to do this,” Mr. Dorsey reflects, “then there’s no reason you shouldn’t put the work in.”

Kristofer Collins is the Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine. He is also co-curator of the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. His latest poetry collection “Roundabout Trace” was published in 2022 by Kung Fu Treachery Press.

First Published: June 11, 2023, 9:30 a.m.