When Pittsburgh poet Jack Wolford died in St. Clair Hospital in December at the age of 60, his passing went largely unnoticed. Despite his considerable bulk -- Jack tipped the scales at a mind-bending 400 pounds before he took sick -- his incessant hand-rolled cigarettes and his ability to command any room by brilliance and bombast, he was virtually invisible, except to a close circle of friends.

	Abby Mendelson teaches literature at Point Park University (abbywriter@verizon.net). His most recent book is "The Pittsburgh Steelers Official History." Some of Jack Wolford's poetry is available online at tpqonline.org and hotmetalpoets.com. A memorial reading, sponsored by the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, will be scheduled next month.

A true child of the 1960s, with all their intellectual fervor and personal excess, Jack survived as the archetypal vagabond poet, a man who shunted off lives as effortlessly as a snake sheds its skin. Like the tumultuous decade that spawned him, Jack was independent, visionary, altruistic -- and self-righteousness, unfocused, bellicose.

When I first heard of Jack Wolford's passing, I was surprised by how affected I was. After all, I hadn't seen Jack in more than three decades -- since we both worked at Oakland's long-defunct National Record Mart.

Even then, in his early 20s, he was a big, blustery man, noticeably smart, not afraid to tell you so. Like a lot of us, he was uncompromising, using a sharp gesture of his meaty right hand to cut off all discussion but his own. With thick, nicotine-stained fingers pushing up his glasses or jabbing the air to make a point, Jack was always arguing, always right -- and why didn't you see it, for heaven's sake?

Since that time, we all had changed, many of us in ways we could scarcely have believed possible. I wondered if Jack had. I wondered if time had filed down that hard edge. So I went looking for him, peering down Robert Frost's road less taken for the fellow who had flown so far below the radar.

Jack wasn't one to leave goodbye notes, so the small Post-Gazette death notice gave me my first clues. Jack A. Wolford II, son of a prominent Pittsburgh psychiatrist, had attended Hobart, where he did not graduate, and the University of Pittsburgh, where he did, in English. Later going to graduate school in anthropology, subset archeology, Jack completed both his courses and Colombian field work, but, well, there was a dust-up with his dissertation director -- a point of principle, don't you know -- and Jack left without his Ph.D.

Drifting from Maine to California, Jack worked in archeology, publishing dozens of scholarly articles on flint tools; owned a bookstore; collected parking lot money; and did whatever it took to keep him in loose tobacco, black coffee and fish sandwiches.

By the new century, the lifelong insomniac had driven his battered blue van back to Pittsburgh, getting by on an Internet rare-book business based in his Canonsburg house crammed floor-to-ceiling with 10,000 books -- and a yard-high stack of unpublished poetry. Slipping into local poetry groups, he was a member of Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange; an unpaid assistant editor at Autumn House, a nonprofit poetry publisher; and co-editor of hotmetalpoets.com, an online publication.

By all accounts, Jack was a dedicated, painstaking editor, endlessly encouraging, tireless in helping organize readings all around the city. Oh, he was off-putting at first, but once people cut through his bravado and blue cigarette smoke, they loved him. Carole Sineni, Jack's hotmetal co-editor, called him a "selfless poetry enabler" -- and sponsored the $500 Jack Wolford Poetry Prize after he died.

It is an award that Jack Wolford himself would have richly deserved, but could never have won. Says Michael Simms, Autumn House general editor, "Jack was an excellent poet but published very little because he refused to court editors in a way that could help him. The smart and politic thing would have been to keep his mouth shut. But Jack was very blunt, saying what he needed to say."

"Jack couldn't find a wall he didn't want to run into," adds fellow poet Michael James, now serving as Jack's literary executor. "He'd write insulting cover letters to editors. When I'd say, 'Jack, you're shooting yourself in the foot,' he'd launch into a tirade about the worthlessness of a life lived untruly to oneself."

Or to others, it seems. One time, Jack altered all the punctuation in another poet's manuscript -- without discussing said changes with either the publisher or the poet. "Presumptuous," Mr. Simms recalls it, adding that "Jack simply assumed that once other people saw the logic of what he had done, they would agree."

Sometimes they did -- and then there was the near-fistfight on the South Side one night, with a stranger outside Tom's Diner over a supposed insult. Or the colloquy at a Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange gathering.

"I'm no poet," a visitor began, tentatively.

"Then shut up," Jack ended the conversation.

"Jack's intensity caused him to be insensitive," recalls Michael Wurster, a Poetry Exchange founder. "He could be brutal, simply bulldozing people. He wouldn't give anyone else a chance."

After Jack was diagnosed with melanoma last August -- in all likelihood, the residual effect of too much South American sun -- neither surgery nor major treatments helped much. Going in the hospital for the last time on Dec. 7, Jack brooked no whispering around him, no maudlin, teary-eyed farewells. Following the Dylan Thomas dictum, he refused to go gentle into anything, much less that good night. Wearing a jaunty bandana to mask his lesion, Jack howled his poet's war cry to the end. As one shocked duty nurse said to a visitor, "my, your friend is profane, isn't he?"

He was, never realizing the need to compromise, never accepting the need to change. "That made him a fine poet," Michael Simms says, but the price was enormous -- no Ph.D., no academic postings, precious few publications, all the hallmarks of the successful poet. Instead, Jack's small, stunted life speaks volumes about paying the price for being difficult, for living the way you want.