What We Pass On: Collected Poems: 1980-2009, by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
For some years I have been reviewing Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry. Before he collected poems, Gillan published eight books of poems, most of which I have reviewed over the years in this column. Her collected works come out at a propitious moment in her long, successful career as a poet. In January Maria Gillan won the prestigious 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. In March at the presentation ceremony on the east coast, she will be presented the award along with Elizabeth Nunez and John Grisham, who was the recipient of the Editor’s Award.
It is equally important to note that previous winners of this award include Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walter Mosley, Susan Sontag, and Amy Tan. The previous winners are among the most important American contemporary writers. Congratulations must also be extended to Guernica Editions, especially Antonio D’Alfonso, who founded Guernica more than thirty years ago and had the foresight to publish her volumes over the years.
Her award is a great honor for Gillan who has worked tirelessly over the last thirty years and more, not only as a poet, but as the founder and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ. More recently she has extended her considerable talent in teaching creative writing to the state university of New York at Binghamton, where she is Professor of Creative Writing and the director of the Creative Writing Program.
In addition to her teaching and writing, she also is the founder and editor of the Paterson Literary Review, among the most respected literary magazines in the U.S. She has also edited three important anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (ed. with Jennifer Gillan), and Italian American Writers on New Jersey (ed. with Jennifer Gillan and Edvige Giunta).
Aside from her important contribution to multiethnic literature in her anthologies, the important aspect of her Barns and Noble Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award is that she won this prestigious award as an Italian American woman writing about the Italian immigrant and post-immigrant experience. I find this not only a great honor for Gillan as a writer, but a success for Italian Americans and the Italian American experience in the twenty-first century.
For too many years Italian American writers and critics have fought a cultural war against what they have always perceived, and correctly so, to be a politically correct mainstream culture. Italian Canadian writers have been up against a largely English- Francophone culture in Canada and Italian American writers have faced a definition of multi-culturalism that has excluded Italians from the American cul- tural mosaic. As a professor in an American university, I can testify to the fact that over the last thirty years American university professors have done all they could to erase twentieth-century immigrant history, especially Italian immigrant history from American history books.
That a main-stream book company would chose to present an Italian American writer with such an award is a statement that the Italian American experience is a legitimate aspect of American culture, one that needs attention and recognition from American historians.
What We Pass On is, indeed, what we as Italians in America have passed on to the next generation, as well as to American society in general. For those of us who have been reading Gillan over the last thirty years, we revisit her many familiar and even now iconic poems on her experiences growing up Italian in New Jersey. She has read these poems over the years at countless readings from New York to California, where she comes each January to read in both Northern and Southern California. In “Public School No. 18 Paterson, New Jersey,” she writes that as an awkward Italian girl in school she in shame of her immigrant back-ground she felt she had to “deny that booted country/even from myself.”
She was the “silent one” in class, afraid that if she spoke an “Italian word” might jump out. But in the end she writes, in a voice that has come to characterize the strength of her poetry, “Remember me, Ladies, /the silent?/I have found my voice/and my rage will blow/your house down.” When she starts her readings with this one, she has her audience for the remainder of the hour in the palm of her hand in rapt attention.
Gillan’s strong and distinct voice holds these large, 437 page volume together. The older poems still sing as they did the first time I read them and reviewed them in this column. In these poems she chronicles her experiences growing up with her immigrant parents in New Jersey. She documents how their old Italian folkways, from the food they ate, the unstylish clothes she had to wear to school, the used cars her father bought, to the shame she had to endure as the “other” in her schools days.
She writes how as a girl she is surrounded by those belittling iconic American images, such as “perky Doris Day,” from the movies that contrast with her own dark-skinned and black hair. Even that famous crooner from New Jersey seemed to have transcended his Italian American roots. As she writes, those people in the movies “with their affected/ accents were so removed from our 17th Street world,/our Italian family, our kitchen table covered in scrubbed/oilcloth and our coal stove, that we regarded them/as foreign creatures inhabiting a world/we knew we couldn’t live in . . . .”
But no matter the hardships she faced as a girl of growing up in a blue-collar Italian American fam- ily, Gillan celebrates the strength of her parents’ underlying Italian immigrant values. She writes of her mother, “I carry your memory with me wherever I go, and understand/ only now that you wanted the scapula and evil eye horn/to give me courage, so that they would make me brave/when you could no longer be there waiting for me/in your warm kitchen, your arms open,/your eyes welcoming me home.”
Gillan celebrates their typical “Old World values” when she writes that to be thrifty her father always brought used cars, but even then her mother was angry because one year he bought a red one: “My mother was shy, hated to call attention to herself, thought this red car crass and flamboyant, like waving a flag to say, ‘Here I am.’” She writes of how when she was growing up their house was small and she was forced always to be in the company of her siblings and parents. It was this closeness that years later she cherishes.
But among the new poems in the What We Pass On Gillan visits her grandchildren who live far from her. Careers and distance has changed the nature of the American family, her family, and she laments the loss of that once close-knit family. As a grand-mother, she visits her grandchildren far from New Jersey and notices how in their big house they have separate rooms and play separately.
There are poems here recording her intense relationship with her now deceased husband. Deep poems where Gillan takes more chances with her emotional self than any poet in the last one-hundred years of American poetry. She is not just concerned with the self: she writes as well, in The Polar Bears Are Drowning,” of the plight of the polar bears and wonders what we as a society are doing to ourselves. This, indeed, is also “what we pass on” to the next generation, our personal as well as social legacy.
What We Pass On is a volume of celebration for Maria Mazziotti Gillan: it caps a remarkable career, not just as a writer, but also, as her award indicates, as a “writers writer,” one who has passed on her legacy as a mother and as a teacher of writing to generations of American poets. Barnes and Noble award is a recognition for Gillan’s remarkable career as poet and teacher.
Since 1976, when Prof. Scambray began a book review column in L’Italo-Americano, he has written more than 275 essays and reviews, including film reviews. A selection of his book reviews appears in The North American Italian Renaissance. His other books include A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller, Surface Roots: Stories, and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel. He presented a paper on Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers at Simon Rodia’s Watts conference in Genoa, (2009) and at the Los Angeles Watts Towers Common Ground: Art, Migrations, Development Conference: UCLA & Watts (Oct. 22-24, 2010). His essay from the two conferences, “California and the Italian Immigrant Experience: The Literary and Artistic Contexts of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers,” will appear in the conferences’ proceedings, Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development, ed. by Luisa Del Giudici. Another version of his paper, “Creative Responses to the Italian Immigrant Experience: Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers and Baldassare Forestiere’s Under- ground Gardens,” appeared recently as a chapter in Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian American Lives ed. by Joe Sciorra. He is completing a study on Italian Immigration in West: 1890-1940. His poems and short stories appear regularly in national magazines.
