Ed Ochester — long-time chair of the English department’s writing program, editor of the Pitt Poetry Series at the University of Pittsburgh Press (establishing its Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) and author of more than a dozen poetry collections — died Aug. 22, 2023, at 83.
“He broke open American poetry” to new and diverse voices, said colleague and his successor as writing program chair, Lynn Emanuel, now professor emerita. “He broke open the kind of influence that a poetry series could have.”
“He was just a legend in publishing and editing,” said Jeff Oaks, whom Ochester hired at Pitt and who is now a teaching professor and director of undergraduate studies in the writing program. “He had this wild and eclectic sense of the possibilities of poetry.”
“It's hard to overestimate Ed's influence in any number of areas,” Emanuel said, “not only in the way he ran the poetry series but in the department. He was … a free spirit, even a rebellious spirit. He was courageous and championed projects that weren't even popular in the department or at the dean's level,” such as creating a reading series with some of the department’s budget rather than hiring a new faculty member. “We had this burgeoning writing program and no visiting writers,” she recalled.
He helped to bring national recognition to writing programs, Emanuel said, placing them on the same plain as composition and literature programs as the president, for two consecutive terms, of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs: “At that time it was a new and growing and novel idea to have an MLA (Modern Language Association) convention, but for writers, and Ed was at major influence in that organization.
“The poetry series had a number of very terrific editors,” Emanuel added, “but (previously) the poetry series hewed pretty closely to a kind of national aesthetic. Poetry was really white and male. When Ed took over, all of that was changed. The complexion of contemporary poetry being published by a smaller press just changed.”
In his department, she said, “Everybody thought he was a marvelous teacher and I would get glowing reports about his teaching. The students adored him. His teaching was informed by a deep background in literature but he was also very approachable. Ed was in no way a snob about anything. He had strong likes and dislikes. But he was never the master standing at the front of the classroom. He was at the table sitting with his students talking about their poetry. He was terrific at giving criticism that wasn't cruel or snobbish.”
Oaks, on whose MFA thesis committee Ochester served, agreed: “Because he was an editor, he line-edited, and that was one of the most useful things to sit and watch him do. The thing that I found most wonderful about him and what I learned from him was how to spot a line that wasn't necessary.”
He recalled being “tricked” into learning to write poetry in a different manner: “I remember our workshop — he actually told us to bring in two poems a week. I started falling behind and started writing a different kind of poetry just to make the assignment. He taught us not to put too much pressure on the poems, to trust ourselves. He liked poems that try to move toward the plainspoken, that didn't have too much poetic decoration on them — not getting the poem to be too tragic, to be too intellectual. And he really liked humor; if you could get him to laugh in a poem, you knew you really got to him.”
Later, as a colleague, Oaks said, Ochester “really defended the writing program. There was a lot of tension about what it meant to be a writer, what writers needed to study.”
Oaks added: “So many of the books I learned my poetry from came from the University of Pittsburgh Press,” to which Ochester brought poets of color, LGBT poets and working class poets. “He really championed people across the long haul of careers.”
Born on Sept. 15, 1939, in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, Ochester earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell in 1961, where he was the editor of the campus humor magazine, The Cornell Widow. He received his masters from Harvard and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He began his academic career on the faculty of the University of Florida in 1967, joining Pitt in 1970. He was editor of the Pitt Poetry Series from 1978 to 2021, publishing hundreds of collections that won or were finalists for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which launched the careers of many diverse American poets.
Alongside creating the Starrett prize in 1981, he served as editor of the Pitt Press’s Drue Heinz Literature Prize and cofounded the poetry journal 5AM.
Ochester published more than a dozen poetry collections, including “Sugar Run Road,” “Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New,” “The Land of Cockaigne,” “Cooking in Key West” and “Changing the Name to Ochester.” His work earned grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts.
He also was the recipient of the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2006 and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Creative Achievement Award in 2001. Following his retirement from Pitt, he was on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars.
“He did so much and he was really humble about it,” Oaks said. “His own poems are so lovely and underrated too. He probably wouldn't even say that. He was just a good heart in the Pittsburgh community.”
“I think about him with great tenderness,” Emanuel said. “He was a very good man and he was a very smart man and he was devoted to poetry when at the beginning very few editors were. He was very special.”
He is survived by his children, Ned and Betsy (Mike Sauter) of Pittsburgh, and a granddaughter, Quincy Sauter.
Memorial gifts are suggested to WYEP.org or the local animal shelter Four-Footed Friends. A celebration of his life and poetry will be announced at a later date.
— Marty Levine