The Moment I Knew My Life Had Changed

THE MOMENT I KNEW MY LIFE HAD CHANGED


It was not until later
that I knew, recognized the moment
for what it was, my life before it,
a gray landscape, shapeless and misty;
my life after, flowering full and leafy
as the cherry trees that only today
have torn into bloom.
Imagine: my cousin at 19, tall,
slender. She worked in New York City.
For my thirteenth birthday she took me
to New York. We ate at the Russian Tea Room
where I was uncertain about which fork to use,
intimidated by the women in their hats and furs,
by the waiters who watched me
as I struggled with the huge hunk of bread
in the center of the onion soup in its steep bowl.
When we were ready to leave, I tried to give the tip
back to my cousin. I thought she had forgotten it.
She said, "No, it's for the waiter!"
On 57th Street a man in a camel coat bumped into me,
rushed on by. My cousin said, "That was Eddie Fisher,"
but I said, "He's too short. It can't be."
I felt let down that Eddie Fisher,
the star I was in love with that year, was so rude
he never even said "excuse me." Then we went into the theater
sat in the front row. the stage sprang into colored light, and
the glittery costumes, the singing, the magical story,
drew me in, made me feel in that moment,
that I would learn again and again,
the miraculous language, the music of it.
My life, turning away from the constricted world
of the 19th Street tenement, formed a line
almost perpendicular to that old life,
I moved toward it, breathed in this new air,
racing toward a world filled with poems and
music and books that freed me from everything
that could have chained me to the ground.


by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Love Poem to My Husband of Thirty-One Years

LOVE POEM TO MY HUSBAND OF THIRTY-ONE YEARS

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

I watch you walk up our front path,
the entire right side of your body,
stiff and unbending, your leg,
dragging on the ground,
your arm not moving.
Six different times you ask me
the date of our daughter's wedding,
seem surprised each time,
forget who called, though you can name
obscure desert animals,
and every detail of events
that took place in 3 B.C.
You complain now of pain
in your muscles, of swimming at the Y
where a 76 year old man tells you
you swim too slowly.
I imagine a world in which
you cannot move.
Most days, I force myself to look
only into the past;
remember you, singing
and playing your guitar: "Black,
black is the color of my true love's hair,"
you sang, and each time you came into a room
how my love for you caught in my throat,
how handsome you were, how strong
and muscular, how the sun
lit your blond hair.
Now I pretend not to notice
the trouble you have buttoning
your shirt, and yes, I am terrified
and no, I cannot tell you.
The future is a murky lake.
I am afraid of the monsters
who wait just below its surface.
Even in our mahogany bed, I am not safe.
Each day, I swim toward
everything I didn't want to know.


Copyright © 1997 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, all rights reserved

Poetry with Maria Gillan & Friends in Berkeley, California

The Place I Call Home - Poetry with Maria Gillan & Friends

Berkeley City College Auditorium

2050 Center St., Berkeley CA

Tuesday, September 18, 7-9 PM

Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s latest book of poems, The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books: 2012), is her 14th volume of poetry. She has also edited four anthologies of mainly ethnic writings, is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and is currently Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Binghamton University, SUNY. In 2008, she won the American Book Award for her poetry volume, All That Lies Between Us.

To help celebrate her latest volume, the Italian American Studies Association, Western Regional Chapter will co-host with Berkeley City College this evening of poetry featuring Gillan reading from her new work (and perhaps some old favorites), and also featuring an array of Italian American poets that will include Sandra Mortola Gilbert, Jennifer Lagier Fellguth, and Giovanna Capone.

Gillan’s new poems, like many of her past ones, recall and revivify her life—her growing up, her parents and their struggles, and her own struggles as daughter, professional woman and mother. With courage and candor she focuses on the most intimate and ordinary details of her experience, past and present, thereby rendering them unique, iconic, and unforgettable.

Join us for what promises to be an exciting evening of poetry with some of the most celebrated Italian American poets writing today.

The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

For more information, please contact Sharon Coleman at scoleman@peralta.edu.

The Place I Call Home

Cover Art:  THE READER, Gouache, acrylic 18 x 24 ©2006
by Linda Hillringhouse | www.hillringhouseart.com

NYQ Books™ is proud to announce the forthcoming release of The Place I Call Home by Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

The place that Maria calls home is a universal haven built of enduring memories and peopled by loving family. In Gillan’s newest book of poetry, The Place I Call Home, we share her complex emotions of an immigrant childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, in the 1950s, her long marriage, her husband’s devastating illness, and her subsequent widowhood. Yet, we also share the sheltering family in which she grew up, the deep love binding her and her husband, the unfolding of her life as a mother and grandmother, and, most of all, her resilient spirit.

She reminds us that even when the bud of youthful naiveté flowers into the reality of an uncaring universe, we are home again when we recall the protection we felt within the warm sanctuary of family. These poems are beautiful crystalline narratives, sometimes exuberant and sometimes poignant, but always unflinchingly true.

“Just like a picture is worth a thousand words, a Maria Gillan poem evokes a thousand pictures. Her masterful book, The Place I Call Home is more about redeeming the past—fi nding grace in the details— than about nostalgia. Unlike Peter Pan who utters, ‘I won’t grow up,’ Gillan shows how she grew into a poet of Proust-like dimensions—memories are contained in objects. She has the courage to delve into her past—making it come alive again—not as a passive viewer but as an active participant. It’s like she has created a large tapestry of her life—every thread is important. I’m man enough to admit that some of these poems made me cry.”

       — Hal Sirowitz, Author of Mother Said, Former Poet Laureate of Queens, NY

"The Place I Call Home by Maria Mazziotti Gillan contains some of the most honest poems about marriage and family a reader is likely ever to come across. The craft is there, the well chosen word or phrase, but the power of these poems comes also from the truth in them that is moving and rare."

      — Marge Piercy

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions).

She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community
College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.

She has published thirteen books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), and Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, Italian Women in Black Dresses, and What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions). With her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers).

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NYQ Books™ was established in 2009 as an imprint of The New York Quarterly Foundation, Inc. Its mission is to augment the New York Quarterly poetry magazine by providing an additional venue for poets who are already published in the magazine.

Maria Gillan September Readings in California

Maria Mazziotti Gillan will be reading at a variety of venues next month in support of her newest poetry collection, The Place I Call Home.

Thursday, September, 13
Moe’s Books
2476 Telegraph Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94704
7:30 PM
Contact: Joyce Jenkins  510-849-2087

Saturday, September, 15
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.,
Corte Madera, CA 94925
1:00 PM
Contact: Allison Bildsoe  415-927-0960 x 233
http://bookpassage.com

Saturday, September, 15
Roy Mash (private event)

Sunday, September, 16
Petaluma Poetry Walk
Copperfields Books Petaluma
140 Kentucky Street
Petaluma, CA 94952
11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Contact: Store 7070 762-0563

Tuesday, September, 18
Berkeley City College, Berkeley
2050 Center Street
Berkeley, CA 94704
Contact: Laura Ruberto  510-981-2922

Thursday, September, 20
University of La Verne
1950 3rd St.
Laverne, CA 91750
10:30 AM - Noon
Contact: Ken Scambray  909-539-3511

Thursday, September 20
MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN
WANDA COLEMAN
AMELIE FRANK
Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd.,
Venice, CA 90291
7:30 PM
Contact: Richard Modiano  Richard@beyondbaroque.org