Tireless, dedicated, unselfish and generous are just some of the words that come to mind when I think about Maria Mazziotti Gillan. My wife Angela and I had the privilege of meeting and speaking at length with Maria afer hearing her give a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the house of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. https://www.nps.gov/long/index.htm
A year or so later, I joined about twenty other apsiring writers to work with her for a couple of days at a writer's retreat in Morristown, New Jersey.
It was a thrill for me to give my late mother signed and inscribed copies of Maria's books, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women In Black Dresses. My mother read both of them with zeal, tears and much enjoyment. Like Maria, she'd been raised as the daughter of hard-working first generation Italian immigrants, and had dealt with all of the trials that entailed. When my mother died, I made a point of finding those two books and passing them along to my sister.
Here is a link to Maria's website: https://www.mariamazziottigillan.com/
And here are lines from her poem, Daddy, We Called You.
Papa,
dragging your dead leg through the factories of Paterson,
I am outside the house now,
shouting your name.
Maria's poems help me conjure meals at winter dinner tables. Warm celebrations to counter the brick and mortar of Paterson. The smokestacks of, say, the Marcal paper plant. I think of the book of George A. Tice photos I bought at a library sale for a dollar. I still have it at home, a black and white documentary of industrial Paterson, a town that once represented so many American towns.
However, that town is long gone. Paterson is a Muslim enclave now. The city mayor, Andre Sayegh, declared on February 28th, 2025 at a Hilal Lighting Ceremony that his city is now the “capital of Palestine” and “the fourth holiest city in the world.”
Maria's America, the one I knew, as well, frankly, it's gone. One must mourn. Her Paterson is no more. As a woman, a feminist, the daughter of immigrants, does she question the myopic liberals who embrace Islam and what it demands from women?
Such questions need to be asked. Sanely, without rancor. Paterson, like America, remains a surface, a lottery ticket, a shadow, a house, apartment and street. Whether Christian or Muslim, it’s in my opinion defined as a souless struggle to get by. On the dole a while, then off it, trying to rise, to get out, to get on, to get up, to conquer, reminded each day of what politicians have and haven’t done, whether it’s de-industrialization, antiquated roads and services, industries shut down, all the jobs that moved away, the poisoned rivers and foods or the chemical spills.
How many Christian enclaves exist the size of Paterson in the Islamic world? Few, if any, I believe. When does Sharia law go to the ballot box or referundum under the name of relgious freedom? How does any of this make sense or promote unity? When have Jews and Arabs ever got along? I should ask Salman Rushdie. Or maybe Norman G. Finkelstein or Mark Levin or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. One of them might know. They've all certainly pocketed enough coin writing books about it.
Maria’s poems don’t wear rose-colored glasses. They contract in the mind’s eye toward sharply heightened and distilled moments with family, with gestures, glances, colors, Western European traditions, terms of endearment, expressions of love and folly and tender loyalty.
Why do I feel we are under attack? At risk of survival. Yet I watch how our government attacks, as well. In the name of Christianity. Inclusiveness. All blatant lies. The bloodshed. How does sanity survive?
I often feel like a foriegner in the nation I was born in. In some circles, I can't even say that I'm a man or act like one. Is that free speech? This is America now for many. On both sides of the deepening divide. Just what the controlling interests want.
Maybe some still believe in the melting pot, but I think it remains a tawdry lie, always was. Immigration, either legal or not, has always meant cheap labor. It's always meant divisions, neighborhood turf battles, inner city rot, shoot-outs, addicts, racial tensions and demarcations, warring tribes, cops on the take, inept and corrupt politicians, those strung-out and those still cheating the systems while others keep working and dreaming -- all are inevitable as part of the human fabric. But, hey, Paterson Muslims are united. They may get their Sharia law one day, too. What do the Amish think of all this? Two really rather tiny cheers for democracy.
https://patersontimes.com/2020/03/11/after-divisive-public-hearing-paterson-passes-law-allowing-islamic-call-to-prayer/
What I admire is that Maria's poems drive me through her life, but she gets off the ghost highway now and then. She brings me beyond her past and her home. They remind me that Paterson is more than one face, one soul representative of America and its fracutured, lauded and downright scary illusory dream. Maria knows there are many more cities and towns and regions just like the New Jersey she writes about so well. She doesn’t force the issue of universality. She lets me as a reader see the bigger picture through the tiniest of her descriptions and metaphors.
So, free man that I am, I read on with delight, with sadness, with fear. I'm altered and charged, unharmed and bettered by her work. Bolstered in my conviction that family -- and any quest of a spiritual nature that brings me closer to the unkown -- is more important and will bring resilience, than what dogma or a public official promises.
This, to me, is why the Paterson as Islamic definition irritates and feels so worrisome. Having lived in the Middle East for four years and having, at times, dipped curiously into the Koran, one thing struck me. Islam is irrevocably tied to the State. The history of the religion, its umblicial link to an intolerant political stance, leads me to doubt that pure fully committed Muslims can live side by side with Christians. The number of attacks, the restlessness, the violent rehtoric, and the written histories bear this out.
Yet Christianity, despite its message of tolerance, is linked to the State, as well. I'm too much a realist to believe peaceful assimilation or harmony will thrive between Christians, Muslims and Jews to become the norm. I suspect just the opposite will occur. The politicians know this. They continue to divide and conquer.
Talk on the street may be cheap, but Maria’s poems aren’t. She doesn’t chirp that the worst of us doesn't exist. No banal optimism here. She’s honest with her readers and with herself. She takes the time to pause and consider beauty, the menace as well as the love that resonates as she pines for the last of her garden roses in full bloom.
Goodbye, Paterson. Maybe it was nice to visit you. There's still William Carlos Williams, or the Jim Jarmusch movie if I care to visit again.
What follows comes directly from Maria's biography online: "My art comes from an instinctive place. In my watercolors and collages I try to do what I do in poetry—that is to let go, to allow the old wise woman who lives in my belly to take over. Often, when I’m writing a poem, it is as though the poem is writing itself, operating out of the subconscious mind after the first few lines. I don’t allow my conscious mind to control what is going on in the poem. For me, the same thing happens when I am painting or constructing a collage. Allowing my imagination to take over, gives me the freedom to paint people, interiors, or the external world as they exist in my mind rather than in reality.
"In my poetry, I try to root my work in the details and specificity of ordinary life, but in my art, I am not attempting to achieve realistic portrayals of people, interiors, or birds, or flowers. Rather, I am trying to capture energy and feeling. I am trying to allow the essence of the subject to come forth, to convey joy or sadness, exuberance or loss."
Having published more than 20 books of and about poetry and four literature anthologies, she is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and is the founding editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also is a Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY.
A collection of her poems along with a selection of her paintings was published as The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets. Her most recent poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Her poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse is Paterson Light and Shadow.
She is the recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), 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).
Maria has read her poems numerous times at universities, festivals, and poetry centers throughout the USA and in Italy, France, Yugoslavia, Finland, Wales, and Ireland.
Here is her poem, What If.
And here is her poem, My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas to Give Me Courage.
.jpg)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
