Maria at the Poetry Center Photo: Jen Brown
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 at PCCC. Here is the first of 3 parts from "A Fireside Chat on Legacy: From Immigrant Roots to the Retirement of Maria Mazziotti Gillan."
MMG: [My] first encounter with poetry was in Public School Number 18. In Paterson, where the teachers would read these 19th-century poems. I loved them. I fell in love with the way English poetry sounded. That was something my parents couldn't do because they didn't actually speak English. So they told us stories, but they were in Italian.
Maria wrote her first play when she was nine.
MMG: I'm sure it was terrible. I started writing poems, but then I was still afraid. I was still hiding behind language and trying to prove I was smart. You know, I was afraid people would think I was an idiot immigrant, and nobody would want to listen to me.
She was first published in a Catholic publication called St. Anthony’s Messenger with a poem about a dog wagging its tail.
MMG: Now, I didn't have a dog, I knew absolutely nothing about dogs. It was the lesson of what not to do.
But from there, she began reading a lot of imagist poems, writing a lot of haikus, and all the while imitating and learning for herself. Finally, at fifteen, she got two pages of poetry accepted by an Italian American journal.
MMG: They [called me] the “next great Italian-American poet.” It was such a nice feeling.
Forty or so years later, at her father’s house for dinner, Maria’s father approached her.
MMG: He always had these little treasures he would give me. And he comes with this magazine, and he said, “You remember this?” And he gives it to me. He saved all this stuff. He saved [that] magazine, which I had lost track of 40 years before.
Now, in her forty-sixth year at Paterson’s historic Hamilton Club Poetry Center, where she served as Executive Director, causes her to reflect. “I feel every day in my bones.”
AB (Arianne Bakelmun): Has that amount of years widened or changed your perspective on how you want to organize things?
MMG (Maria Mazziotti Gillan): First, I had to learn to do the job because I had never done a job like this before. I had always taught. I had never done administrative work. I had never done a press release. I had never done a budget. I’d never done a grant report. So I had to learn to do all those things. And there wasn’t anybody to teach me. So I taught myself how to do it. And then after a while…I expanded all the programs that I started [and they] got bigger and bigger, because I have an idea, and then it blossoms into this gigantic thing.
This is a running theme for Maria.
MMG: I’m kind of a genius that way! I always thought of myself as kind of a lower-class, immigrant kid who’s kind of stupid. And I realized as my life has gone on, I’m amazing. Where I come from, I shouldn’t have been able to do anything.
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.
