Maria Gillan at AWP in Chicago

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, M.L. Liebler and Charlie Rossiter will be giving Off-Site Poetry Readings during the AWP 2012 Annual Conference in Chicago.

The off-site reading will be Saturday, March 3rd from 2-3:30 pm at the Oak Park Public Library, 834 Lake Street in downtown Oak Park. It is easily reached by taking the Green Line west and getting off at Oak Park Ave. Then walk north one block to Lake St. and look left. The large modern building next to the park is the Library. If you are taking some time away from the conference, Oak Park has good restaurants and is easy to walk around and admire Frank Lloyd Wright creations.

On Thursday at 7 pm, Coffe House Press Presents Working Words: Working Class Writers at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago. Reading from the Coffee House Press working class literary anthology edited by M. L. Liebler will be Jim Daniels, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, Allison Adele Hedge Coke, M. L. Liebler, Carlos Cumpian, Cynthia Gallaher and many surprise contributors.

On Friday, March 2, at 3:30 p.m., Maria will be signing purchased copies of her book, What We Pass On:  Collected Poems 1980-2009 at the small press distribution table at Hilton Chicago Hotel, 720 South Michigan Avenue. 

While you're in town, take the Chicago walking poetry tour...

Poetry Reading for Winners of 2011 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards

The winners of 2011 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards will read their winning poems at a poetry reading and award ceremony on Saturday, March 10, 2012, at the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College.  This free program, hosted by Exectuive Director Maria Mazziotti Gillan, will take place at 1:00 PM in the historic Hamilton Club Building of Passaic County Community College, 32 Church Street, corner of Ellison, downtown Paterson.

The readers include:  First prize— Christopher Bursk, Langhorne, PA, “Adam – Albrecht Durer – 1507” and Charlotte Muse, Menlo Park, CA, “My Father’s Violin.” Second prize—Mark Hillringhouse, Englewood, NJ, “Orpheus” and Sander Zulauf,  Andover, NJ, “Coming Home from My Forty-fifth High School Reunion.”  Third Prize—Antoinette Libro, Sea Isle City, NJ, “Curtains for Mother.”

Honorable Mention recipients, also  joining the program, include :  Svea Barrett, Fair Lawn, NJ, “Deconstruction;” Anthony Buccino, Nutley, NJ, “Jersey Geese;” Mary Crosby, Ringwood, NJ, “The Ramapoughs;” Gail Fishman Gerwin, Morristown, NJ, “Dear Mama;” James D. Gwyn, Clifton, NJ, “Backstage;” Carrie McLeod Howson, West Orange, NJ, “What Do Poets Do?”; Josh Humphrey, Kearny, NJ, “Give Me;” Bruce Lowry, Summit, NJ, “Leftover Fries;” Shahé Mankerian, Sherman Oaks, CA, “Thank God for Judas;” Lynne McEniry, Morristown, NJ, “Sunday Sauce;” Colleen Michaels, Beverly, MA, “Blueberry Donuts;” Carolina Morales, Trenton, NJ, “Clean;” F.L. Niccoletti, West Orange, NJ, “The ‘59 Impala;” Barry W. North, Hahnville, LA, “Sunday Mornings;” Diane Pohl, Morris Plains, NJ, “When you were 9;” Nicole Santalucia, Binghamton, NY, “Looking for Lima Beans;” Mina Seckin, Brooklyn, NY, “The Seventeenth Year;” Laura Shovan, Ellicott City, MD, “Honor Roll.”

The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, honoring Allen Ginsberg’s contributions to American Literature, are given annually to poets, both established and emerging. Poems are judged anonymously with first prize winning $1,000, second prize, $200, and third prize, $100.  Winning poems and honorable mentions are published in the following year’s issue of the Paterson Literary Review. Winners are asked to participate in a reading and award ceremony that takes place at the Poetry Center. The deadline for 2012 entries is April 1.   For further information, contact Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Executive Director, The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, at (973) 684-6555, or visit www.pccc.edu/poetry.

The Poetry Center strives to maintain a barrier-free facility including complete access for patrons using wheelchairs.  Large print materials, FM listening systems, audio publications and Braille transcriptions are available on request. 

The Poetry Center was named a Distinguished Arts Project and awarded several Citations of Excellence, and is funded, in part,  by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Poet Laureate of Awful Truths

In an online article a few years ago, Donna Gialanella of the The Star-Ledger dubbed Maria Mazziotti Gillan "the poet laureate of awful truths."

The article was written at a time when her husband, Dennis, was struggling with Parkinson's disease. He had always been a part of her poetry. But new poems of that period were not love poems, but ones that chronicled him wetting his pants in his wheelchair, and recalled an argument more than 20 years before that was the first and only time he ever struck her. Another poem ("Selective Memory" from All That Lies Between Us) has her husband announcing that if something happened to her, he would remarry. Her response: "your words sting worse / than if you had stabbed me."

My daughter tells me I practice selective

memory, that I erase the parts of the past

I don't like or don't want to know.

I denied it but then I thought maybe

she was right after all, that maybe I need

to soften the sharp edges of memory, as though

I were working colored chalk over a painting.

So it must have been selective memory

that I was practicing when I let myself

forget that I've always loved my husband

more than he loved me, that fact I forced

myself to forget as he grew ill and we grew

together over the years, moments glittering

like gold in rock the way those remembered

glimpses of a beloved face or the feel

of a hand or words spoken softly stay

with us...

Though Maria sometimes worries that her poems may seem mean, she says that "I think there were so many things we weren't supposed to talk about when I was growing up that I feel compelled to say the unsayable in my poems."

And yet, anyone who know Maria, knows that she is anything but mean. She is more likely to be described as a warm, Italian grandmother who is well known for helping students, and new and established writers. She readily admits that one of her flaws is her inability to say No.

And she advise those students and new writers to follow her and go "into that cave, find the deepest part of you, and write about it."

After living with Parkinson's disease for twenty-five years, her husband passed last year. Maria continues to write about him. In a recent poem, “Watching the Pelicans Die,” that was started several weeks after his death, there are two narratives. Following a writing prompt that she gives her own students, she goes back and forth between two seemingly unconnected things, finally finding something in common between them to use as a thread to weave the poems together.

She says that it was "a very difficult poem to write, because I could not confront my husband’s final weeks directly, and it became commingled in my mind with the BP oil disaster. The black slick of oil on the sand and water made me incredibly sad at a time when I was watching my husband die, and watching his hands go black at the tips. The poem is a howl of sorrow for the world and also for my husband."

But, the poet laureate of awful truth also finds in that cave the truth that is not awful but always honest, as in the conclusion of "Selective Memory."

I watch you, your face
twitching and moving, your neck twisting,
your arms jerking, and I remember
how much I love you, and would
even if you married someone else,
even if I had to return from my grave
to haunt you, even then, I can't help
the tenderness I still feel
when I look at you.

Maria Gillan and Laura Boss to Read in Chicago

Guernica poets Laura Boss and Maria Mazziotti Gillan are making their way up to Chicago in March to take part in a couple of events and we’ve got all the details!  First up is Working Words: Working Class Writers Read where authors included in the award-winning Coffee House Press anthology, Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams, edited by M. L. Liebler will read from the book. Maria and Laura will be joined by M. L. Liebler, Carlos Cumpian, Cynthia , Jim Daniels and many surprise contributors. Admission to the event is free. 

For more info go to:  http://news.guernicaeditions.com/2012/02/08/catch-laura-boss-and-maria-gillan-in-chicago/

Announcing MariaGillan.com

Maria's official website, mariagillan.com, is now online!

The site will host biographical information and links to all of Maria's books, audio & video, poems and news of Maria's activities.

Gillan and Boss Reading February 25

Maria Gillan  
Photo: Jennifer Brown, The Star-Ledger

Laura Boss

On Saturday, February 25, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Laura Boss will be reading their poetry as part of the North Jersey Literary Series at the Classic Quiche Cafe (Special Events Room) located at 330 Queen Anne Rd. in Teaneck, New Jersey.

The reading is at 8 pm and is free of charge. It will be followed by an open reading.

For further information contact Paul Nash & Denise La Neve, 201-692-0150
http://classicquiche.com

Get Rid of the Crow

Two excerpts from an interview with Maria Gillan conducted by Emily Vogel, poetry editor of Ragazine, in 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.

Poetry is alive and well in Paterson!

 “Poetry helps you release your emotions,” said 34-year-old Paterson resident, Andre Stewart. The first poem he had written was to impress a girl when he was about 12. Now, 22 years later, although the fondness for the girl has faded, his love for poetry continues to grow.

In the open-reading portion of the Poetry Reading event that took place at the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College on Saturday, Stewart read a poem in tribute to Bob Marley entitled, “Who Was Bob?”

From Marley to Martin Luther King Jr., the topics of the open-reading section were diverse as poets from not only Paterson, but also neighboring cities, recited their poems.

“For me, Paterson is connected to poetry,” said Maria Mazziotti Gillan, the executive director of the Poetry Center, whose writing has been influenced by her early life in the city. “I think poetry teaches us how to be human; it’s a way of connecting people, a way of telling stories to one another.”

Read more at http://thealternativepress.com

Maria Gillan, Laura Boss and others to read in Oak Park

For all you Chicago folks....Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, M.L. Liebler and Charlie Rossiter will be reading at the Oak Park Public Library. Here are the details for this free event:

Saturday, March 3rd
2-3:30 pm
Oak Park Public Library
834 Lake Street
In downtown Oak Park

Easily reached by taking the Green Line west and getting off at Oak Park
Ave.--then walk north one block to Lake St. and look left. The large
modern building next to the park is the Library.

Out-of-towners, if you forget directions, just look for tall downtown
bldgs. which is EAST and take it from there. If you are taking some time
away from the conference, Oak Park has good restaurants and is easy to
walk around and admire Frank Lloyd Wright creations.

Library contact person: Debby Preiser; dpreiser@oppl.org