Where I Come from

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is one of the most influential living Italian-American poets. She is also active in the field of multi-ethnic poetry, and is the editor of the prestigious "Paterson Literary Review." Her poetry has been compared to the poetry of the great William Carlos Williams, who came from the same area in New Jersey. And from William Carlos Williams (whom she loves), she has learned that great poetry comes from "the cup that runneth over", that is, from emotion, from intuition, and from the genuine wonder at the marvel of life. Hers is poetry that is deceptively simple and that is based on content, images, and recollections, rather than semantic funamnbolism. Her poetry also pivots around recollection, in that she follows Wordsworth's tenet that poetry is "life recollected in tranquility."Although Mazziotti Gillan's poetry deals essentially with her experience as an Italian-American, it transcends her own ethnic origins to reach a reality that encompasses all shades and shapes of American faces and the many ways to be American.Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the "Paterson Literary Review". With her daughter Jennifer Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed 1994 anthology "Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry and Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American", published by Penguin in 1999. She is also the author of seven books of poetry, including "Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems" (Guernica), "The Weather of Old Seasons", Cross Cultural Communications), and "Winter Light", an American Literary Translator's Award winner. She has had several poems published in "The New York Times", "The Christian Science Monito"r, and "Poetry Ireland", as well as in numerous other journals. Awards for her work include the 1998 May Sarton Award, two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships, and a Chester H. Jones Foundation Award. In addition, she was a finalist in the PEN Syndicated Fiction competition. She has appeared on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Leonard Lopate's Books and Co., and Garrision Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Her poetry book, "Things My Mother Told Me", was published by Guernica in 1999. Currently, she is at work on a memoir entitled "My Mother's Stoop."Maria Mazziotti Gillan's poetry is bold and gutsy, and deals directly and unflinchingly with the complicated terrain of race and ethnicity in the United States. It also boldly deals with feeling, family, and expectations, with love and longing, with childhood and old age. Mazziotti Gillan is a courageous, risk-taking poet, who does not hesitate to bare her soul. She reveals the most intimate details of her life, her family relations, her experiences as a child, as a lover, as a wife, as a mother. These experiences, far from being only It

The poet's mother is the unifying spirit in this collection of heartfelt poems ablout family life. The mother is the vehicle through which Gillan's Italian ancestory comes alive and by which hope against all odds is maintained. Through these poems we come to understand how a family--any family-survives the hardships of the present through its links with the past and dreams for a future. The poems in this collection are written in everyday language aout everyday experiences. They speak in clear, cirect language about what it means to be human. They also remind us of the importance of place in shaping our lives. This book is a gem, and I think it would appeal to a wide cross-section of people. It will make you laugh and cry. I loved it.

This luminous poetry collection is about much more than ethnicity. Certainly, those with an Italian American background will be especially moved by the poems that directly address that experience, but Gillan's work succeeds in transcending any single identity category and explores instead the multiple ways in which each of us learns to identify him or herself. Addressing the intricacies of class and ethnicity that determine one's relationship to what is considered "mainstream" American culture, these poems derive their power from the genuine experience of growing up poor in an Italian American neigborhood in a city of factories, rowhouses, and vacant lots. Reflecting a complex attitude toward this space, as well as to the close-knit community that both nourished and stifled her talents, these poems speak to anyone who as a child secretly wished to be a member of a "normal" made-for-television family, only to appreciate as an adult the freedom and imagninative possibility that result from embracing one's personal past and cultural origins.

The previous reader seems to be wearing blinders that allow a look only at this ethnic aspect of Gillan's poems. Too bad. There is much more here about motherhood, heritage, city life, growing up and yes, about all those things in a frame of Italian- American Culture. Read "Arturo" & "Public School #18" and see if you don't agree. Gillan has worked hard, in her anthologies, poems and work as an editor and teacher to promote the cause of poetry and the dropping of ethnic & racial barriers. Take a closer look.