Part of a series of interviews with Maria Mazziotti Gillan
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| The Hamilton Club, home to the Poetry Center in Paterson |
How did you start the Poetry Center in Paterson?
I started the Poetry Center in bits and pieces. As I started doing some readings, I would say can you give me a room at the college because I am an adjunct instructor? Although I couldn’t pay an honorarium to the friends I invited to read, they did it for me as a favor.
Soon, I had officially set up a reading series followed by a poetry contest and an anthology of the winning poets’ poems. I worked to create a magazine. At that time, it was called Footwork, but I later I changed the name to the Paterson Literary Review.
After a couple of years, I decided I would apply for a New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant to get some money to fund some of the programs that I was doing. In 1980 I got the first grant for the Poetry Center, and I was able to do use that to pay for some contest prizes and modest honorariums for poets. With that step, The Poetry Center was officially born.
Since then, I’ve added a lot of different aspects to The Poetry Center, and along the way the New Jersey Council in the Arts has always been very helpful in funding our new programs. Of course, I could not have run them without the financial support of Passaic County Community College, which allowed me to formalize the center into a Cultural Affairs Department, expand its programs, hire more staff members, and find us more space. The school president and various administrators have shown invaluable support for what my department tries to bring to Paterson and Passaic County. Many people benefited from our programs, and we have had a number of people who have donated money or left us money in their wills.
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| Maria talking with Allen Ginsberg |
When I first started there were a lot of complaints claiming that a community college didn’t need to cover cultural affairs, have art galleries, a Poetry Center, or host community events like a Kids’ Poetry contest or a theater program. I had to fight every step of the way for a budget to be able to support these programs, but I was determined to bring poetry and poets to Paterson and to also offer community programs in art, music, theater etc. I’ve been doing that ever since the 1980s. Part of our mission has been to bring the arts to everyone.
In the realm of poetry, I wanted to counter the trend in universities toward the production of esoteric poems. I went through that phase in school, and it prevented me from telling my story. I encourage people to write down-to-earth poems with clear language and clear emotion. This raw honesty helps build a broad, popular audience for poetry and helps people not feel that they are excluded from poetry or the arts more generally because of they’re too poor or not educated enough.
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.
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