PITTSBURGH — One of Billie Nardozzi’s greatest strengths as a poet is persistence.
“I do pretty much one a day — like the vitamins,” he said after serving a visitor doughnuts at his kitchen table one recent afternoon.
Mr. Nardozzi, 58 years old, retired from his job as a liquor-store cashier last year. He now cleans rooms part time at a Holiday Inn Express near Pittsburgh. That leaves more time to write poems, a hobby that began in 1978, when a suburban newspaper published his first, a tribute to the Beatles.
Today, his main outlet is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For eight years, as often as once a week, Mr. Nardozzi has paid more than $50 for a few inches of space in the Celebrations section, usually reserved for engagements and anniversaries.
“We usually pay people to write for the paper,” said the executive editor of the Post-Gazette, David Shribman. “In a period of declining revenue, it’s always nice to have someone pay us.”
Each poem is accompanied by a black-and-white picture of Mr. Nardozzi, his hair in a pouffy mullet style. He includes his phone number for anyone who wants to chat.
His style is plain spoken, his inspirations diverse. He writes about anything from the comfort of a loyal dog to the pain caused by insensitive relatives. His verse tends to be low on angst. “I hate negativity,” says Mr. Nardozzi, who often writes his poems, longhand, on a lined legal notepad in his home office.
Some of his poems pay tribute to individuals. A recent one, for instance, is dedicated to Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto:
He’s great for this city
And he’s what we have needed
And his ideas for change
Should always be heeded
Mayor Peduto said he has a framed copy of the poem, mailed to him by Mr. Nardozzi, on his office wall. Representatives of the Queen of England, the Prince of Wales and Conan O’Brien all sent thank-you notes for poems dedicated to them.
Given his penchant for the Beatles, he once penned an ode to the people of the United Kingdom. That poem, called “The British,” reads, in part:
I think you’re the coolest people
Living on this earth
And honestly and seriously speaking
I really think it is there from birth
And you write the most beautiful songs
That I have ever heard in my life
For they speak of passionate love
Between a gentleman and his wife
Many of his poems are published online by the Arkansas Free Press, which welcomes contributions but doesn’t pay for them. “Billie is our most prolific writer,” said Tracy Crain, editor of the Free Press. “He has a very tender heart, and he really has a need to share.”
Several poems allude to the breakup of his 32-year marriage. One deplores a friend’s cruel words:
So to you I am asking
Would you please just stop
Because the tears I’ve been crying
Are requiring a mop.
Mr. Nardozzi has been paid only once for poetry. Three years ago, a woman in Denmark sent him a check for 449.20 Danish kroner (about $68). He believes she was going to use one of his poems, “4th of July,” in educational material.
“I went to the bank to cash it and they said, ‘This is in another country. We can’t cash it,’ ” Mr. Nardozzi said. He had it laminated as a souvenir.
The odds tend to be against poets. The Poetry Foundation of Chicago, publisher of Poetry magazine, receives more than 100,000 poems a year. It publishes 300 of them. The Academy of American Poets, in New York, puts a poem on its website daily. It doesn’t encourage unsolicited offerings.
Some poets read their work in bars. Others tape it to telephone poles.
Lynn Gentry, a poet and musician who lives in Brooklyn, sits with his manual typewriter in New York subway stations and writes poems on whatever topics passersby suggest. He gets donations, typically $5 or $10. John Mortara, a Boston poet, runs Voicemail Poems, a service that encourages people to phone in their verse for possible publication online. Dana Killmeyer of Pottstown, Pa., has read poems on buses in Las Vegas.
Mr. Nardozzi, a divorced father of three grown children, has his own tactics for getting notice. A few years ago, he sent a poem to a Baptist church in Mississippi, “just at random,” he said. The church published the verse in its bulletin, he recalled. “You never know,” he said. “You’ve got to take chances at things.”
Mr. Nardozzi’s father was a truck driver and his mom a notary public. As a teenager, he was obsessed with rock music. At a high school talent show, he performed “Piano Man” on his guitar.
He still emulates rock-star style, with silky black shirts and big, candy-colored rings on his fingers.
He keeps readers’ letters, neatly bound with ribbons, in a file drawer. Only a few are critical. One wrote: “Don’t you have anything better to do than write your stupid poems? Also, what’s with the 60’s hair?” Mr. Nardozzi laminated the letter.
One admirer set up a Facebook page dedicated to Mr. Nardozzi and attracted 234 likes.
Mr. Nardozzi says he gets frequent phone calls from Post-Gazette readers. One, he recalls, berated him for misusing quotation marks. (He puts them around any word he wants to emphasize.) Some callers are drunks but most are older women, he said: “They laugh and they cry, and I cry with them.”
Brett Yasko, a graphic designer in Pittsburgh, prizes the simple honesty in Mr. Nardozzi’s poems and has put hundreds of them on a website (billynardozzi.tumblr.com). “I just feel like someday somebody is going to want to have a record of this,” he said.
In 2010, Mr. Yasko organized a poetry reading by Mr. Nardozzi at a downtown Pittsburgh art gallery. Dozens of people showed up. One wore a bracelet with the letters WWBND, short for “What would Billie Nardozzi do?”
Sometimes Mr. Nardozzi gives poetry readings at nursing homes. “Most of the time I don’t get paid for that either,” he said. “But if they offered, I’d take it.”
One of his happiest moments came late one Christmas Eve when he returned to his tidy brick house overlooking a freeway. A reader in California had left a voice mail, saying she had been reading his poems with her bridge club. “It makes you feel pretty good,” he said, “and it makes you say, ‘Keep it up,’ you know?”
First Published: February 26, 2015, 12:20 p.m.
