Wednesday marks what would be the 80^th birthday of Andy Warhol. This simple thought -- of an octogenarian Warhol -- registers a shock more profound than his signature fright wig.

The Prince of Pop Art, who died in 1987 at the age of 58, is a global icon that has come to signify that which is eternally hip and edgy and young. The art market now values a Warhol for three times as much as a Rembrandt.

But why should Warhol, who created his boldest art 40 years ago, still matter? In his new book "The Fame Formula," public relations guru Mark Borkowski observes that "[a]fter that initial rush of fame, a new thermodynamic reaction must be set off under the famous thing or person, most likely by a publicist, if they are to remain in the public eye."

The lingering power of Andy's ghost is surely one of the great mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Warhol's ascension to the cultural heavens is even more dramatic and American considering his roots. He was born in smoky, Roaring '20s Pittsburgh to working-class Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, attended Schenley High School and Carnegie Tech, before leaving in 1949 to seek fame and fortune in Manhattan. He was born under the sign of Calvin Coolidge, who himself was famous for saying, "The business of America is business." Warhol took that to heart. When many artists of the 1960s decried materialism, Andy embraced art and money. Even in this decade Warhol has ranked among Forbes magazine's top dead celebrity moneymakers.

I have long been interested in the enigma that is Andy Warhol. As a boy I first read of him and his soup cans in the pages of My Weekly Reader. My mother compounded my sheer amazement by boasting that Warhol was po nashomu, our people -- Carpatho-Russian, as then we were known.

Then she claimed Andy as a distant cousin to us on her mother's side of the family tree. Unbelievable.

Yet as Cousin Andy's fame accelerated, my mother's boasting stopped. How could he be, I wondered, of my parents' generation, and of our obscure Carpathian tribe, and of the Byzantine Catholic Rite, and of Pittsburgh, and also of Manhattan, where he behaved like a crazed celebrity and made blue movies, too? Incredible.

So America has appropriated, domesticated and commodified Warhol, especially here in Pittsburgh, where his sins are now forgiven and his admirers decorate his grave with soup cans and a golden bridge bears his name and his status as native son is secured by an eight-story, 88,000-square-foot, single-artist museum -- a veritable Taj Warhol. Unbelievable.

And once the Iron Curtain fell, I finally traveled to our ancestral villages, kilometers apart, in what's now Slovakia. I checked the genealogical records: same surname, but no relation. That, finally, I could believe.

A few years ago I had a poetic idea: to write a poem-by-poem serial portrait of this serial portrait pioneer. I would draw on the rich Warhol mythology. A cognate of Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," my project was to write 100 Andy poems.

"Warhol-o-rama," published this week by Carnegie Mellon University Press, is homage, and many of its poems are necessarily acts of Warholian appropriation or parody. I've selected three for this page.

Of the dead, we Carpatho-Rusyns pray, "Vichnaya pamyat," which translates as "eternal memory." Warhol's 15 minutes of fame seem to have no end in sight. So to his living spirit I should raise a glass. Na zdorovja!