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Maria Mazziotti Gillan: Poet & Editor Italian American Writers of New Jersey

Love Poem to My Husband of 31 Years | Dream of My Gandmother and Great Grandmother| The Moment I Knew My Life Had Changed

MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University-the State University of New York where she teaches poetry. She is the founder and the Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. She has published : seven books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), Where I Come From and Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica).She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer of three anthologies published by Penguin/Putnam: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic In America and is the editor of The Paterson Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Connecticut Review, and Rattle, among other journals and anthologies. She has won the Fearing Houghton Award(2001), the May Sarton Award from the Poetry Club of New England, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship for the Virginia Center for the Arts, and two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Poetry. Her book, Italian Women in Black Dresses, was published in 2002 by Guernica Press: Toronto, Canada.

She recently edited ITALIAN AMERICAN WRITERS ON NEW JERSEY: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose, with Jennifer Gillan and Edvige Giunta, published by Rutgers University Press, 2003 @ 100 Joyce Kilmer Ave., Piscataway, NJ 08854. Tel. 1-800-446-9323 <www.rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/>. The anthology includes such notable writers as Gay Talese, Tom Perrotta, Louise DeSalvo, Maria Laurino, Pietro di Donato, Daniela Gioseffi, MaryannMannino, Grace Cavalieri, Frank Finale, Diane DiPrima and many others-- proving that TV shows like "The Sopranos" totally misrepresent the Italian American culture of Jersey. Ms. Mazziotti-Gillan has done more than any other writer to promote the image of Italian Americans as poets and writers in her home state, and to combat the sterotype which so unfairly plagues her culture. The actual, proven, statistical fact is that there is no higher percentage of mob crime among Italian-Americans than any other nationality, minoirity or majority, in the United States and that rate is less than .01 percent. ITALIAN AMERICAN WRITERS OF NEW JERSEY has just been chosen as a Book Club Selection by The Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA)--an organization founded to help in combating the cruel stereotyping of Italian Americans by Hollywood and Television, as well as other media. It can also be ordered through The Order of Sons of Italy in America at <http://www.osia.org/> which works at the community, national and international level to promote the heritage and culture of an estimated 26 million Italian Americans, the nation's fifth largest ethnic group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Samples of Maria Mazziotti-Gillan's poems follow and are linked @ top page:

LOVE POEM TO MY HUSBAND OF THIRTY-ONE YEARS

I watch you walk up our front path,
the entire right side of your body,
stiff and unbending, your leg,
dragging on the ground,
your arm not moving.
Six different times you ask me
the date of our daughter's wedding,
seem surprised each time,
forget who called, though you can name
obscure desert animals,
and every detail of events
that took place in 3 B.C.
You complain now of pain
in your muscles, of swimming at the Y
where a 76 year old man tells you
you swim too slowly.
I imagine a world in which
you cannot move.
Most days, I force myself to look
only into the past;
remember you, singing
and playing your guitar: "Black,
black is the color of my true love's hair,"
you sang, and each time you came into a room
how my love for you caught in my throat,
how handsome you were, how strong
and muscular, how the sun
lit your blond hair.
Now I pretend not to notice
the trouble you have buttoning
your shirt, and yes, I am terrified
and no, I cannot tell you.
The future is a murky lake.
I am afraid of the monsters
who wait just below its surface.
Even in our mahogany bed, I am not safe.
Each day, I swim toward
everything I didn't want to know.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 1997 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, all rights reserved.

I DREAM OF MY GRANDMOTHER AND GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

I imagine them walking down rocky paths
toward me, strong, Italian women returning
at dusk from fields where they worked all day
on farms built like steps up the sides
of steep mountains, graceful women carrying water
in terra cotta jugs on their heads.
What I know of these women, whom I never met,
I know from my mother, a few pictures
of my grandmother, standing at the doorway
of the fieldstone house in Santo Mauro,
the stories my mother told of them,
but I know them most of all from watching
my mother, her strong arms lifting sheets
out of the cold water in the wringer washer,
or from the way she stepped back,
wiping her hands on her homemade floursack apron,
and admired her jars of canned peaches
that glowed like amber in the dim cellar light.
I see those women in my mother
as she worked, grinning and happy,
in her garden that spilled its bounty into her arms.
She gave away baskets of peppers,
lettuce, eggplant, gave away bowls of pasts,
meatballs, zeppoli, loaves of homemade bread.
"It was a miracle," she said.
"The more I gave away, the more I had to give."
Now I see her in my daughter,
the same unending energy,
that quick mind,
that hand, open and extended to the world.
When I watch my daughter clean the kitchen counter,
watch her turn, laughing,
I remember my mother as she lay dying,
how she said of my daughter, "that Jennifer,
she's all the treasure you'll ever need."
I turn now, as my daughter turns,
and see my mother walking toward us
down crooked mountain paths,
behind her, all those women
dressed in black

________________________________________________

Copyright 1998 © Maria Mazziotti Gillan. All rights reserved.

THE MOMENT I KNEW MY LIFE HAD CHANGED

It was not until later
that I knew, recognized the moment
for what it was, my life before it,
a gray landscape, shapeless and misty;
my life after, flowering full and leafy
as the cherry trees that only today
have torn into bloom.
Imagine: my cousin at 19, tall,
slender. She worked in New York City.
For my thirteenth birthday she took me
to New York. We ate at the Russian Tea Room
where I was uncertain about which fork to use,
intimidated by the women in their hats and furs,
by the waiters who watched me
as I struggled with the huge hunk of bread
in the center of the onion soup in its steep bowl.
When we were ready to leave, I tried to give the tip
back to my cousin. I thought she had forgotten it.
She said, "No, it's for the waiter!"
On 57th Street a man in a camel coat bumped into me,
rushed on by. My cousin said, "That was Eddie Fisher,"
but I said, "He's too short. It can't be."
I felt let down that Eddie Fisher,
the star I was in love with that year, was so rude
he never even said "excuse me." Then we went into the theater
sat in the front row. the stage sprang into colored light, and
the glittery costumes, the singing, the magical story,
drew me in, made me feel in that moment,
that I would learn again and again,
the miraculous language, the music of it.
My life, turning away from the constricted world
of the 19th Street tenement, formed a line
almost perpendicular to that old life,
I moved toward it, breathed in this new air,
racing toward a world filled with poems and
music and books that freed me from everything
that could have chained me to the ground.

All poems Copyright ©1998-2002 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Used by permission of the author. All rights including electronic rights, reserved.

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