PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Special Featured Poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan

PoetryMagazine.com

Maria Mazziotti Gillan
USA

Photo Credit: Joe Costa

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers and the 2008 American Book Award for her book All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions). The Place I Call Home is from New York Quarterly Press. She is the Founder /Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published 15 books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica Editions). With her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers). Her latest book is “The Place I Call Home” (NYQ Books, 2012) and she has book forthcoming in April 2013, entitled Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories from MiroLand Publishers (Guernica).

Poetry Credit: Poems are reprinted from The Place I Call Home with permission of the author and New York Quarterly Books

The Riots in Cairo

Outside the window, snow swirls from the sky.

Students run across the quad in sweatshirts.

Two minutes ago the sun was out. Now

it looks like Alaska. In the newspaper photo, thousands

of people are rioting in the streets. So many people

crowded together, it almost looks as though they are

standing on each other’s shoulders.

When I was nineteen, I went to Times Square

on New Year’s Eve with Chuck the boy

whose last name I’ve forgotten though he was the first boy

I slept with. The idea of Times Square

on New Year’s Eve excited me, but being there

I thought I’d suffocate—my face shoved against

the jacket of a man who was at least six-feet tall,

whose shoulders were wide as a building.

I wanted only to get out but there was so much noise

that Chuck didn’t hear me, people in front of me

and in back and on the side, terror sharp as tin in my mouth.

I look again at the photos of the riots in Cairo and wonder

if in those crowds, there’s a girl who finds herself, suddenly

wanting only to escape all the people, pushing

and pulling around her. The rioting has been going on for days.

What little it would take for the riots to spread to other places,

for the Middle East to blow up.

We sit in this classroom, protected by warmth and brick from the snow

outside the windows, from the riots and bloodshed and famine

that roar through so many parts of the world,

while we, with our snacks and pill bottles, our safe skins,

don’t know enough to be grateful for everything we have.

Two excerpts from an interview with Maria Gillan conducted by Emily Vogel, Poetry Editor of Ragazine April 2011.

On Her Early Poetry: For many years, I wrote poems based in the English literary tradition and I was anxious to hide behind language, images, and literary references. Then when I was 40, my first book was published, and a graduate school professor said, “You know, it’s in this poem about your father that you find the story you have to tell.” Then I thought, well I don’t have to be an English Romantic Poet, maybe I can be just what I am – a wife, mother, daughter, granddaughter, grandmother, an Italian American – and write poems from those perspectives. I began then to write more directly and specifically about events and people in my own life, and to be as honest as I could be about what my life was actually like. It took me a long time to have the courage to write with honesty, specificity, and directness. Gradually, I made my language plainer and plainer in an attempt to lessen the distance between myself and my reader.

Advice To Emerging Poets: The advice I give to emerging poets is that they have to get rid of the crow in their minds, the one that tells them everything that is wrong with them. The crow will try to stop them from descending to the deepest places inside of themselves, the place I call the cave, where all their memories and experiences, good and bad, reside. The cave is where they have to have the courage to go, if they are going to write, if they’re going to be honest enough to search for the stories they have to tell. It is in specificity that we find the universal, rather than the other way around. The mind does not control the poem. It is the old woman or old man who lives in our bellies, who helps us to be wise truth-tellers. We need to learn to trust that inner voice, and not to depend on the intellect to guide us.

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