Poem: The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did

Dante Di Stefano. writing for the Italian American Studies Association, published "Frail and Ferocious as a Sparrow: The Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan." In that essay, he says: "Why are we so much more than we appear to be?” This sentence implies the solidarity created by living in a world where none of us can answer the poet’s question. 

He looks at Gillan's poem, "The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did,” from Ancestors’ Song, which he feels responds to this question particularly well. 

"Ancestors’ Song is perhaps Mazziotti Gillan’s finest collection, and this particular poem exemplifies the poet’s project of dramatizing the remembering self. The poem follows roughly the narrative arc described in “Growing Up Italian,” as Gillan charts her journey from ignorance through knowledge of difference, to self-hatred culminating in the desire to blend in, and ending in the realization of the beauty and of the permanence of the Italian-American identity she sought to erase. The poem reads:

At Eastside High School, most of the Jewish

girls had their noses done, all of us wanting to erase

any hint of ethnicity or race. I envied those girls, so bright

and competent, those girls who could afford to change

their noses into proper American noses and not the ethnic

noses we were born wearing. As soon as I started to work

after college, I paid for a Master’s degree and when I got

my first college teaching job, I decided I was going to have my

nose done. I made an appointment with a plastic surgeon, told

him what I wanted, and he told me what day to report

to the hospital and I signed myself in. I was terrified that

my parents would find out and kill me, but I went through

with it anyway. On the operating table, I heard the doctor say,

“We’re going to give her a perfect nose,” and then, I swear, I heard

him break the bone in my nose. When I woke up I had bandages

over my nose and two enormous black eyes. I was in the hospital

two days and then I called home and told my mother

that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town,

where the conference was held and where I had never been.

As with all lies, my story was perhaps a little too elaborate.

I think my mother guessed, but my father would have killed me,

so she didn’t tell him anything. Instead, she nursed me back

to health, bringing me chicken soup, toast and tea. When my cousin

came to visit, she said, “Oh, your nose looks the same to me.” I knew

she was saying it to make me feel that my hooked nose had not changed

at all, but I was happy to be rid of it, to have become American

or so I thought. Years later, I am ashamed of my willingness to erase

that nose, so large and unmistakable, for this ordinary, inoffensive

nose, this American nose, my hooked nose, always there

on the inside, always Italian, always mine.

DiStefano continues: "Why are we so much more than we appear to be? The poem answers that we are much more than we appear to be because we are underwritten with cultural legacies that are as indelible as the ghost of Gillan’s hooked Italian nose. This poem enacts the breathlessness of remembering through the torrent of conjunctions it employs. The rhetorical device of polysyndeton magnifies the overwhelming rush of memory in the lines: 'I was in the hospital / two days and then I called home and told my mother / that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town, / where the conference was held and where I had never been.'

The poem’s resolution is once again contingent upon Gillan’s confrontation with shame and her rejection of the melting pot as a viable symbol in her narrative of the American experience. In this poem, the hooked nose she surgically erased is the true American nose. Significantly, the poet becomes American by remaining Italian, as the poem underscores in its concluding moment by praising: “this American nose, my hooked nose, always there/ on the inside, always Italian, always mine.”

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Poet Jim Reese Virtual Poetry Workshop and Reading May 30

On Saturday, May 30, 2026, poet Jim Reese will conduct a virtual workshop followed by a reading as part of the Poetry Center at PCCC's Distinguished Poets Series.

The workshop via Zoom will run from 1 PM – 2:30 PM (EST) and be followed by the poet’s reading from 2:30 PM – 3 PM (ET). 

Poetry Center readings are always free and open to the public. Registration is required for all workshops with a fee of $20. ​You can check registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center.

Poetry Center readings are recorded and archived later for viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

Jim Reese is an associate professor of English and director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty University in Yankton, South Dakota. He spent fourteen years in residency for the National Endowment for the Arts’ interagency initiative with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where he established Yankton Federal Prison Camp’s first creative writing and publishing workshop. He is the author of eight books, including the nonfiction collection Bone Chalk, and has received several awards for his writing and public service. 

Link to the live and archived reading  youtube.com/live/

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Telling Your Story: A Memoir Workshop

The Poetry Center at PCCC is offering "Telling Your Story: A Three-Week Memoir Workshop."

This new summer series workshop is on memoir, an extension of narrative poetry.

Led by Dr. Christine Redman‑Waldeyer, the Poetry Center’s new Poetry Director & editor of the Paterson Literary Review, author, and holder of a D.Litt. in Creative Writing. This six‑session virtual workshop will help you shape lived experience into a compelling memoir through writing prompts, guided discussion, and supportive feedback. Explore voice, structure, memory, and emotional truth while developing strategies to continue your work beyond the course.

Registration: $110

Time: 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm (EST)

June 1, 3, 8, 10, 15, 17 (Mondays & Wednesdays)

Information and registration form

Dr. Christine Redman-Waldeyer holds a Doctor of Letters from Drew University, where her creative dissertation, The Poet’s Easter: A Healing of Mind, Body, and Spirit, examined both poetic craft and the healing potential of the reader–writer relationship. She is the author of five poetry collections, a writing textbook, and the editor of a published anthology, and her work has appeared in numerous literary journals.

Living With Loss: Maria Gillan's 'The Silence in the Empty House'

Anna Citrino, on her blog, Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage, wrote about "Living with Loss" and finds comfort and insight in Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s book of poems, The Silence in an Empty House. Citrino describes it as "a beautiful book of poems describing experiences in her relationship with her life partner, who had a terminal illness. While experiencing the territory of loss, the writing takes the reader into the heart of a relationship and the many small moments and memories that build and connect one life to another in intricate interweaving."

Citrino's post, "Living with Loss," is excerpted here:

"In her poem, 'Watching the Bridge Collapse,” Gillan describes how life can change in ways never expected.

We loved each other. Our children were
smart and healthy and beautiful. How could we lose?
then one day you, who could swim a hundred laps
in the town pool, who ran even in a mid-winter
snowstorm, began to move slower and slower,
your hands no longer functioning the way
they always had, your legs unwilling to obey
your brain’s command. And now, your head bent
sideways, so it nearly touches your shoulder,
your legs so weak they cannot hold you up,
your voice thin as a thread.

The situation Gillan describes is excruciatingly difficult. We acknowledge age brings diminishment, but to witness the vitality of one you love slowly decline in so painful a manner is a loss no one hopes for. Nevertheless, the poems show Gillan confronting the loss and suffering day after day, although there is no possibility for expectation that her husband’s condition will improve. This is a struggle any of us could find ourselves in. As Gillan later points out in her poem, “What is Lost,” we do not know what our future will hold. “We all believe that if we just do what we’re supposed to/ the world will remain firm beneath our feet,” she writes. But this isn’t how it is for many people, and one of the things I especially appreciate about Gillan’s poems in this volume is how she describes her losses so directly. In the poem “My Daughter Comes Home to Take Care of Her Sick Father,” Gillan speaks openly about the difficulty of her situation. “I do not understand,” she writes, “how love could become so complicated./ I am ashamed that some part of me wants this to end, to just/ stop.” Her honesty about her struggle in coming to terms with what she has been given is powerful and moving because the story she tells is bigger than simply her own personal story. It’s the story of all who struggle against things that seem unbearable. She speaks the words that are nearly impossible to find when the burden of loss is so enormous it lies beyond the ability to name.

When someone we love finds themselves struggling under difficult circumstances, it’s natural to want to offer help and solutions. Yet sometimes there are no solutions. When her husband tells her of his fear of being blind in the poem, “Because You Keep Turning to Me,” Gillan writes, “I offer what comfort I can, and when I hang up, I cry/in my hotel bed because you keep turning to me/ and all I have to offer is my hands, useless and empty, and too far away to even stroke your head.” I read her words and recognize my own emptiness in trying to meet the loss I sense in others around me who are suffering. Gillan extends her expression of the depth of our incompleteness in such circumstances in her poem, “There is No Way to Begin.”

“There is no way to begin this poem, to say how I who have
always believed that whatever happens, things always
work out for the best, have finally been brought
to my knees, not to pray as I did in Blessed Sacrament
Church on Sixth Avenue when I was a girl, but in defeat,
unable to find the thread of joy that has always
waited for me just beyond tears.”

When we look at others’ suffering, we suffer too. The brain’s mirror neurons tell us this. One of Gillan’s poems, “Watching the Pelicans Die,” speaks directly to our interconnectedness, demonstrating so effectively how human suffering is reflected in the natural world as well. The drowning pelicans’ bodies caught in the BP oil spill are an echo of her husband’s painful effort to rise above the weight of the disease that wants to drown him. Oil covering its body, the bird in Gillan’s poem screams without sound, “a picture of torment and despair,” the silent despair Gillan recognizes her husband and family daily bear as they try to survive the calamity the disease has created–the suffering from which there seems no end.

…On the Gulf, the earth and sea
are being destroyed, just as you were by the disease that finally
defeated you after you struggled against it for all those years.
Some things are bigger than all of us. We cannot defeat
them. If there is enough carelessness and greed in the world
even the ocean can be destroyed…

Our life is intertwined with the life and suffering of the planet. Suffering continues, and so does the brave effort to meet it. “You never gave up,” Gillan writes in her poem of the same title, “you kept doing whatever you could do,/ fell each day because you’d try to walk even though/ you no longer could.” Spelling out an alphabet of loss as time passes, moments of sudden memories of beauty, but also the months and years of loneliness and the long process of letting go, letting things be what they are. “The world is too full of grief,” she writes in her poem “Planting Flowers in Iraq,” a poem about a groundskeeper planting flowers when the very same week two hundred people were killed by car bombs, and Gillan recalls a mother’s face overcome with grief as she lifted her dead child in her arms. “The world is too full of grief,” Gillan writes.

It’s true. The pulse of loss throbs inside the silence. Everywhere one looks, tears and sorrow wait beneath the surface of things. I think of the 9/11 memorial designed by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, where once the Twin Towers stood in New York City. An immense sense of loss envelops you as you approach the memorial, then stand to look as water pours its delicate and silvery life over the square’s edges into the firm earth, then falls again endlessly and forever into a bottomless space that cannot be fathomed, seen, or known. The grief feels utterly palpable and weighted with presence, moving beyond words into a space where grief lives and doesn’t end. This is grief embodied.

How do we get to the other side of grief? How do we live beyond, into or with loss that feels too immense to bear? How do we find a way to name the grief, to hold it and still keep living? In her poem, “What if?” Gillan writes,

And what if, this moment, wrapped in the gauze shawl
of stillness, is the secret after all, to learn to look
more closely at the varied world, the veins of a leaf,
a stone, the stippled pattern of bark, and to find,
even in the shape of our hands, the curve of our nails
the ability to lift a cup and drink, the secret of loving
the transfigured world?

An answer is to learn to look, and where Gillan turns her gaze is to nature. Nature, too, has experienced enormous and unspeakable losses, especially in the past few centuries, but life is still present, available to us as a renewing source when we look deeply. Tree and stone, our own hands lifting a cup to drink. From the transfigured world, we can drink and draw new life. As Gillan points out, it is when we allow ourselves to be wrapped in the “gauze shawl of stillness” that we enable ourselves to connect to the commonplace of the world in its transfigured form. This, in turn, allows us to see our experience as part of a greater whole."

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's most recent books are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow  and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter . Her collection of poems along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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