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.
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.
