This is a third excerpt from "A Fireside Chat on Legacy: From Immigrant Roots to the Retirement of Maria Mazziotti Gillan."
"She had good examples in her parents. Her father immigrated from Italy first, and he “didn't have two cents in his pocket.” He worked in the U.S. digging roads, as a janitor, and was a rebel leader of the Union. Additionally, he had a lot of literary ambitions himself. Maria often fixed his English in the many letters he wrote to the editor. Because of his Union affiliation, Maria’s mother was denied entry to the U.S. and had to make the trip later, in steerage, six months pregnant. “She was so sick,” Maria adds. Yet her father was really intelligent, she emphasizes, and her mother very practical.
Even as he aged, Maria remembers her father retaining his radical political activism. He demanded to march on Washington over thirty years ago, when Reagan was president. However, at that point, he was in a wheelchair, and a march on Washington was out of his reach.
MMG: He wanted to say, "Hey, what are you doing? This is America!" (laughs) And he saw what could go wrong in the country because they saw it in Italy. So he knew how quickly you lose your freedom, which I feel is slipping away from us now. And we're sitting here like a bunch of dingbats.
Her parents loved this country, and Maria shares her father’s deep concern.
MMG: That's a wonderful thing about this country, that the immigrants were able to contribute so much. And so I hate what's happening now. This hatred of immigrants is more than I can bear.
Her mother, meanwhile, never discouraged Maria from bringing her book to the dinner table. She thought Maria’s poetry ambitions were crazy. Yet, her mother bought Maria her first typewriter.
MMG: She went out and bought a Smith Corona portable typewriter, in a pink case, for me. It took her a year. She sewed coats in a factory; she was paid twenty-five cents an hour. She put it on layaway. She kept paying them fifty cents a week until she had it, and she gave it to me.
Unlike many of her peers, Maria’s parents never pushed her to work at a factory or marry young.
MMG: [My mother] wanted me to do what I wanted to do.
Maria mirrors their love, intelligence, work ethic, and care for Americans and the larger world.
AB: How do you hope what you've built here would be an antidote to the closed-minded view of immigrants?MMG: I hope my poetry is. I get letters from all over the world. I get letters from all over the country. Garrison Keillor read a lot of my poems on the Writers Almanac. And I was on All Things Considered and a couple of other NPR programs. So I get letters from people on top of a mountain in Montana, where I've never been, responding to my work [about the immigrant experience] because I think we are a country of immigrants. As a consequence, we have to make room. Because immigrants built the country.AB: I read your poem [Shame is the Dress I Wear]. You talk about the experience of being a little [immigrant] girl. I’m wondering how you think that little girl would see you now.MMG: She'd be fainting…I didn't talk! I was afraid of everybody. I was like a little chicken. But she's there inside me. Sometimes I'm surprised by finding she's still there.Maria relays the memory of reading her poetry at Trinity College, seeing all the faculty dressed in tweeds, little sweaters, and nylons, looking the very picture of American WASP.
Maria, in her dress printed with big flowers, uncovered that day how much she still felt like that small, shame-filled girl.
AB: So, what would you say to your younger self about what you've created?MMG: I'd say, look at it! You didn’t think I can do it! I did it! (gleeful, peeling laughter) That's what I’d have to say. Pull up your big boy pants and get going! And my mother's idea was you could fall on the ground with a broken leg, and she would say, it's all in your mind, stand up. You can do it. And that is serving me in very good stead. I mean, I have broken a lot of things, but I have gotten up again.
Maria certainly has done what she and others never could have imagined. At a family dinner once, her cousin—the first in the family to go to college—asked sixteen-year-old Maria what she planned to do after graduation.
MMG: He was expecting me to say, “secretary.” I said, “I want to be a poet.”And he said, "Well, that is the most impractical ambition I've ever heard.” And you know, he called me about 10 years ago, and he said, " I'm very sorry I said that. I remember saying that, and you did it.”AB: What did that mean to you to hear that?MMG: Oh, God. Because his voice was in my head. The idea is that you're too poor. Poor people are not poets. They work at a job, and they get married. Women, especially, get married when they're 17 or 18. I knew I wasn't getting married. I knew I was going to college. Whatever I had to do to get there, I was going to go to college. And I was gonna try to be a poet."
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.
