Poem: In Third Grade I Fell in Love (With Commentary)

In Third Grade I Fell in Love

with language. The poems and stories, read aloud to us
in the dusty classrooms of PS 18 in Paterson, New Jersey,  
had a music that lifted me up above the scarred desks,
names and hearts carved into them
by generations of children, bored from the torture
of sitting still for hours.
 
For me, in my shy skin, the spaces in the school
meant for recess or gym were terrifying,
but inside the classroom, I loved
the books we read and the ones the teachers read to us.

At home, we spoke a southern Italian dialect
that brought Italy to 17th street.
But outside, I was in America.
though wary that I wasn't American enough.

In the classroom, I learned that English had a different kind of music,
one I could move to as if I were dancing.
I loved the poems that repeated themselves in my brain.
After I memorized a poem, I could carry it with me,
as though I had slipped it in my pocket
and could slip it out whenever I was alone and afraid.

My parents could not read to us in English,
but those teachers, all the ones I never thought to thank,
opened the door into a world far from my Italian family,
its aroma of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove,
of rosemary and mint growing outside the back door,
bread baking in the oven.

In books, I could find the way to leave the skin I was born in,
to enter the worlds that appeared on the very first page.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Was your poem, “In Third Grade I Fell in Love,” geared to a specific audience or for anyone who would listen?

Well, I hope when I write a poem that it is clear and direct enough to reach anyone who reads it. I was prompted out of my own need to explain my love of poetry written in English, particularly since I was an immigrant child who did not speak English when I went to school. I also wrote it in gratitude to all the teachers I never thanked for reading aloud to us in English and for making me hear the music of the language when it was spoken aloud. My own parents couldn’t speak English and couldn’t read to us in English, but those teachers gave me a gift that I can never repay. It’s only now, so many years later, that I wish I had written to them to thank them. Of course, now it’s too late. But wherever their spirits are, I hope they feel my love for them and my gratitude.

I hope this poem speaks to other people who also learned to love the way the language sounded when read aloud and learned to speak through writing when they couldn’t articulate what they felt inside to have conversations, as I could not, because I was so shy.

In the poem, you say that “The poems and stories read aloud to us in the dusty classroom of PS 18 in Paterson, New Jersey had a music that lifted me up above the scarred desks, names and hearts carved into them by generations of children bored with what, for many of them, must have been the torture of hours sitting still.” 

Could you say more about what you mean by “music” there? Is there a danger that fewer will hear that music today because of all the distractions around us, such as the constant temptation of social media?

When I say music, I mean that in a poem, there is a kind of interior music that carries you along— at least it’s music that I can hear. Certainly, Italian has its own kind of music because it is my first language. I will always love the sound of it; but English opened so many doors for me and led me to worlds I could not have imagined when I was a child. If you close your eyes and listen to a point where out loud, you hear a rhythm and a sound, it helps you to memorize the poem in order to carry it with you. For me, even when I revise poems, I have to read them out loud to hear when the sound falls flat. It helps me to revise the poem. I also find it helpful when working with my students to assist them with revisions, if I read the poem out loud so they can hear where it goes off.

There is a constant temptation today to spend so many hours on social media. I think it’s not just that we don’t listen to poetry being read out loud, but that we don’t read. I would suggest to students who are not particularly fond of reading that they might want to get audiobooks and listen to them in the car. The more you get to hear the language, the more it becomes a part of your body. The more it becomes a part of that instinctive place where poems come from, the more you will be changed by the writing and by what the writer is trying to tell you.

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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.

Paterson Poetry Prize Winners To Give Workshops and Readings Saturday April 11

The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College is presenting on April 11, 2026, poetry workshops by the Paterson Poetry Prize Winners Joan Kwon Glass and Nancy Miller Gomez.

 

There are still seats open for workshops with either poet. Registration is required for workshops. Coffee, tea, and a light breakfast will be provided for workshop participants. You can confirm registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center. Workshops are available for a fee of $20. In-person workshops will be held at the Poetry Center in Paterson from 10 AM to 12  PM. 

Following their workshop, poets will give a reading at 1 pm. Poetry Center readings are always free and open to the public. These readings are recorded and archived for later viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

Full information on all the poets at Readings at The Poetry Center at PCCC

Directions and parking information for the Poetry Center 

Nancy Miller Gomez (she/her) is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books), winner of the 2025 Paterson Poetry Prize, and Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). An Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, LitHub, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and was awarded a fellowship from the Jentel Foundation. Gomez co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, the Juvenile Hall, and as part of Cornell University’s Prison Education Program. She earned a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego, an MFA in Writing from Pacific University, and has worked as an attorney and a TV producer. Originally from Kansas, she now lives with her family in Northern California. As the Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz, she is working with the County Office of Education to provide poetry workshops to youth throughout the county.

 

Joan Kwon Glass is a diasporic, mixed-race, Korean American poet, author of the poetry collection DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS (Perugia Press, 2024), which won the 2025 Paterson Poetry Prize and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2025 Balcones Poetry Prize. Her book, NIGHT SWIM, won the 2021 Diode Book Prize. Joan’s poems have been featured on NPR and in Poetry, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, Korea Quarterly, Best American Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She has been a featured reader at the Westchester Poetry Festival, the Boston Book Festival, and MASS Poetry and is a 2025 SWWIM writer in residence. Joan has served or is scheduled to serve as a visiting writer at Amherst College, Smith College, Wesleyan University, The New School, West Chester University, UCONN and elsewhere. She teaches workshops at Brooklyn Poets, Poets House, and Hudson Valley Writers Center and lives in Milford, CT.

 

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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.

Reading on April 9 Cancelled

Due to ill health, Maria will be unable to read as scheduled on Thursday, April 9th, at the Carriage House in Fanwood.  

Hopefully, this reading will be rescheduled for later this year.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan on Her Poetry Legacy: Part 3

Maria Mazziotti Gillan was interviewed by Arianne Bakelmun for Visions, the newspaper of Passaic County Community College, just before her retirement as Executive Director of the Poetry Center.
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."

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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.