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| Maria and Allen Ginsberg at the Poetry Center at PCCC |
"For me at 17, I didn’t think of myself as a revolutionary writer. Rather, I thought of myself as a writer at home who was trying to learn from other writers. I was reading all the poetry books I could, and I was imitating them in some way. This imitation was probably a necessary step, but I kept doing that until I was around 40.
At that time, I found what I had to say and began to believe that people would be interested in reading poems about an American woman who did not speak English until she went to school, one who grew up poor in an immigrant community in an overlooked city and who had no reason to believe she could be a writer but wrote anyway.
I never allowed myself to stop writing. Once I stopped imitating other writers, I decided to never again be pushed into doing what was trendy or popular. Today, I champion clarity, toughness, and honesty in poetry. Whether that is revolutionary or not, that’s what I do because I want to change the world one poem at a time. I want to convert lots of people to loving poetry, to have them actually reciting it to themselves when they are alone.
I do not believe intellectual, philosophical, or language poetry can change the world because it does not affect people in the same way. I do believe that if you can open people’s hearts to poetry, if you can make them feel something, get them to smile or laugh or cry, then you’ve reached them in a deep place where then they can change their own writing and the way that they see the world. Listening to their work, in turn, helps you change what you see in the world. That chain reaction of change is what can make poetry revolutionary."
Read all the interviews with Maria Gillan here
Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new 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 which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.
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