Frail and Ferocious As a Sparrow: The Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan

“The universe is made of stories / not of atoms.”
—Muriel Rukeyser

“When we start speaking of home and homeland, we experience the first failure of homecoming.”
—Svetlana Boym

Taken as a whole, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry obsessively confronts her experience of coming to terms with her hyphenated identity and her working class origins. In a sense, her body of work consists of one poem, “Growing Up Italian,” written over and over again. “Growing Up Italian” emblematizes the techniques and preoccupations that run throughout her poetry. As the poet Joe Weil has noted, Mazziotti Gillan’s poems aspire to the aria; and like the aria, each poem needs to be considered as part of an operatic whole. These poems are her biancheria, her embroidery work, homespun, artful, delicate, her dowry for future generations.  Each poem represents a Whitmanesque attempt to chronicle her own American journey as the daughter of Italian immigrants. This journey takes her away from, and returns her to, the “dark foreign self” she initially hated as a schoolgirl.  This is the story of how the young girl whose first poem was published in St. Anthony’s Messenger went on to become an internationally recognized poet and professor.  For Mazziotti Gillan, the processes of assimilation into the mainstream American middle class are convoluted and nuanced, fraught with peril and freighted with meaning. Her work constantly retraces the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, and yet the hills of her ancestral home in San Mauro, Italy haunt even her earliest poems. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work resists the coming of age narrative that it often asserts.  Mazziotti Gillan’s work also explicitly rejects the assimilation narrative that is often puts forth; in fact, Gillan’s poetry challenges fixed notions of American-ness by dramatizing the processes of remembrance so important to the construction of identity in traditional Italian-American families.  Mazziotti Gillan’s ultimate subject, therefore, is the remembering self.  

Although Mazziotti Gillan’s poems often alternate between contemplating love and loss, grief and joy, pride and shame, these emotional tropes merely provide the backdrop for her exploration of how the mind and the heart constitute themselves in any given act of recollection. In this sense, her poetic project runs parallel to the English Romantics, particularly Wordsworth.  Also, like William Blake, Maria Gillan would agree that “a tear is an intellectual thing.”  The intellect and the emotions overlap and intermingle in all of her poetry. Sorrow becomes a hypothesis. Hope, a theorem.  Desire, an ecstatic deduction. To fully represent the limits and depths of memory Mazziotti Gillan blurs the boundaries between feeling and reasoning.  In her poem, “Thinking About the Intricate Pathways of the Brain.” Gillan writes of a snail shell that she holds in her palm: 

I think if you could travel into it
deep enough, if you could take that journey
to the center, you’d discover
the witches waiting
with their chants and runes,
but if we gave them names,
they’d be able to escape,
like all the fears of which we are ashamed
and all the memories that lie
in the rabbit warrens 
of the brain,
pathways that lead
to the witches with their
bags full of the past. 

The snail shell here represents Gillan’s mind. It represents Gillan’s poems. It represents Gillan’s poems representing the mind.  The witches, with their chants and runes, articulate the fear and shame that the rational mind might purge through naming, but in the elliptical and vertiginous nightmare logic of remembering the incantation of the poem leads right back to the same pack of crones this act of naming sought to ward off. In other words, memory is circular and each journey the poet takes into the mind leads “to the witches with their/ bags full of the past.”  Significantly for Gillan, the poem ends with an evocation of two selves: a six year old self who is afraid of heights and a slightly older, intrepid, self, both swinging on a swing set, “legs reaching up/ toward leafy trees and the perfect/ puffy clouds of a July morning.”  

Mazziotti Gillan complicates her representations of the remembering self by constantly reiterating the notion of a divided, multi-layered, Italian-American identity. The prose poem, “The Onion,” provides an overt statement of what constitutes this divided, multi-layered, self. The poem, in full, reads:

“Shaded in layers from burnt umber to pumpkin to gold, this onion curves upward in a graceful arc, the line of a womb perhaps or the shape people draw to represent women. Curved and rounded in on itself, only one burnt orange strip of skin, frail as parchment, flaps loose, pointing down and away. The rest, layer on layer, protects its heart. I am like that, private as a bud, wound tight, circling in on itself.

We are all like that, yet peel us away, one layer at a time, and underneath, at the core, each of us with a secret to tell, burning under the bleached scalp. I hold this earth fruit in my hand. Pumpkin-colored lines flow upward toward the tip, never wavering in their journey as though flowing from some hidden river. Why are we so much more than we appear to be? Touch the veined skin, the cool roundness. We cannot know its secrets. It does not murmur as the shell murmurs; it keeps to itself, wrapped in its thin skin, frail and ferocious as a sparrow. Even the stars dim watching us, our backs to the wall.”

In its use of extended metaphor this early poem, from 1981, bears the imprint of Robert Bly’s influence, the poet to whom it is dedicated. The poem in dialogue with Bly’s so-called Deep Image School, differs greatly from most of Mazziotti Gillan’s mature work.  Although “The Onion” characteristically uses plainspoken, conversational, diction and syntax, Gillan engages in a direct line of philosophical enquiry here centered on the image of the onion. In Gillan’s later work, personal experience, rooted in her Italian-American identity, took the place of totalizing universal symbols such as the onion.   

For Robert Bly, the onion is a symbol with great political resonance, linked as it is with his translation of Miguel Hernandez’s poem, “The Lullaby of the Onion,” a poem in which the poet, imprisoned in one of Franco’s jails meditates on a letter from his wife, which relates that she and their infant son have been surviving on onions during his incarceration.  It is fitting that a seminal poem in Maria Gillan’s body of work should recall one of the great political poems (also one of the great love poems) of the twentieth century. The accessibility of Gillan’s poetry and her willingness to speak for underrepresented and marginalized groups stem directly from her experiences as the daughter of hardworking, poor, Italian-American immigrants in Paterson, New Jersey. Although “The Onion” does not explicitly invoke her ancestry, the poem provides a blueprint for the body of work that followed it. “Private as a bud,” “frail and ferocious as a sparrow,” Gillan has been “peeling back layers” for her entire career as a poet. This is a blunt metaphor, a common metaphor, but an apt one nonetheless.  Gillan’s work privileges bluntness and commonness, as a political and an aesthetic stance.   

Maria Gillan’s political and aesthetic stance might be summarized by the famous words of the Salvadoran poet, Roque Dalton, who once said: “I believe that the world is beautiful and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” Even in her earliest poetry, her political consciousness is present in the faith that each one of us is essentially alike, and like the onion, united by the complexity of our protected hearts, by the secrets “burning under the bleached scalp.” The image of burning under the bleached scalp here both anticipates and subverts the false hope, dramatized in poem after poem, for a miracle that would turn Gillan’s dark skin light, and would make her pale and blonde and beautiful. Whiteness, in “The Onion,” is literally peeled back; the process of self-discovery involves the shedding of consecutive skins. However, the poem ends with the sentence: “Even the stars dim watching us, our backs to the wall.” This sentence implies the solidarity created by living in a world where none of us can answer the poet’s question: “Why are we so much more than we appear to be?”

A later poem, “The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did,” from Ancestors’ Song, responds to this question particularly well. Ancestors’ Song is perhaps Mazziotti Gillan’s finest collection and this particular poem exemplifies the poet’s project of dramatizing the remembering self. The poem follows roughly the narrative arc described in “Growing Up Italian,” as Gillan charts her journey from ignorance through knowledge of difference, to self-hatred culminating in the desire to blend in, and ending in the realization of the beauty and of the permanence of the Italian-American identity she sought to erase.  The poem reads:

At Eastside High School, most of the Jewish 
girls had their noses done, all of us wanting to erase
any hint of ethnicity or race. I envied those girls, so bright
and competent, those girls who could afford to change 
their noses into proper American noses and not the ethnic
noses we were born wearing. As soon as I started to work
after college, I paid for a Master’s degree and when I got
my first college teaching job, I decided I was going to have my
nose done. I made an appointment with a plastic surgeon, told
him what I wanted, and he told me what day to report
to the hospital and I signed myself in. I was terrified that
my parents would find out and kill me, but I went through 
with it anyway. On the operating table, I heard the doctor say,
“We’re going to give her a perfect nose,” and then, I swear, I heard
him break the bone in my nose. When I woke up I had bandages
over my nose and two enormous black eyes. I was in the hospital
two days and then I called home and told my mother 
that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town,
where the conference was held and where I had never been.
As with all lies, my story was perhaps a little too elaborate.
I think my mother guessed, but my father would have killed me,
so she didn’t tell him anything. Instead, she nursed me back 
to health, bringing me chicken soup, toast and tea. When my cousin
came to visit, she said, “Oh, your nose looks the same to me.” I knew
she was saying it to make me feel that my hooked nose had not changed
at all, but I was happy to be rid of it, to have become American
or so I thought. Years later, I am ashamed of my willingness to erase
that nose, so large and unmistakable, for this ordinary, inoffensive
nose, this American nose, my hooked nose, always there
on the inside, always Italian, always mine.  

Why are we so much more than we appear to be? The poem answers that we are much more than we appear to be because we are underwritten with cultural legacies that are as indelible as the ghost of Gillan’s hooked Italian nose. This poem enacts the breathlessness of remembering through the torrent of conjunctions it employs. The rhetorical device of polysyndeton magnifies the overwhelming rush of memory in the lines: “I was in the hospital/ two days and then I called home and told my mother/ that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town,/ where the conference was held and where I had never been.”  The poem’s resolution is once again contingent upon Gillan’s confrontation with shame and her rejection of the melting pot as a viable symbol in her narrative of the American experience. In this poem, the hooked nose she surgically erased is the true American nose. Significantly, the poet becomes American by remaining Italian, as the poem underscores in its concluding moment by praising: “this American nose, my hooked nose, always there/ on the inside, always Italian, always mine.”  

The admission of guilt and shame in Gillan’s poetry always culminates in a restorative gesture. Confession in her poems always leads to affirmation. The purpose of poetry, for Maria Mazziotti Gillan, is avowal and renewal.  Gillan’s poem, “Daddy, We Called You” clearly demonstrates these motions of avowal and renewal.  The poem confesses:

One night, riding home from a date,
my middle class, American boyfriend
kissed me at the light;  I looked up
and met your eyes as you stood at the corner
near Royal Machine.  It was nearly midnight.
January.  Cold and Windy.  You were waiting
for the bus, the streetlight illuminating
your face.  I pretended I did not see you,
let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you
on the empty corner waiting for the bus
to take you home.  You never mentioned it,
never said that you knew
how often I lied about what you did for a living
or that I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,
find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

 The denial of the father in this poem is a denial of the self and a dramatization of the remembering self.  By confessing the sin of shame for her father, the poet avows her love for him. There is a directness to Gillan’s poem that admits no posturing. By affirming her love of her father, by admitting the difference that he represented and of which she was ashamed, the poet reconnects the tissue that her denial eviscerated.  The autobiographical “I” in this poem is a universal “I,” channeling the experience of anyone who has denied their roots and disregarded their heritage, if only for a moment. 

Similarly, in her poem “Arturo,” Gillan traces the denial of her father and herself.  Just as in “Growing Up Italian” and “The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did,” “Arturo” dramatizes the remembering self, turning regret and shame into triumph and hope. The poem reads: 

I told everyone
your name was Arthur,
tried to turn you
into the imaginary father
in the three-piece suit
that I wanted instead of my own.
I changed my name to Marie,
hoping no one would notice
my face with its dark Italian eyes.

Arturo, I send you this message
from my younger self, that fool
who needed to deny
the words
(Wop! Guinea! Greaseball!)
slung like curved spears,
the anguish of sandwiches
made from spinach and oil;
the roasted peppers on homemade bread,
the rice pies of Easter.

Today, I watch you,
clean as a cherub,
your ruddy face shining,
closed by your growing deafness
in a world where my words
cannot touch you.

At 80, you still worship
Roosevelt and JFK,
read the newspaper carefully,
know with a quick shrewdness
the details of revolutions and dictators,
the cause and effect of all wars,
no matter how small.
Only your legs betray you
as you limp from pillar to pillar,
yet your convictions remain
as strong now as they were at 20.
For the children, you carry chocolates
wrapped in goldfoil
and find for them always
your crooked grin and a $5 bill.

I smile when I think of you.
Listen, America,
this is my father, Arturo,
and I am his daughter, Maria.
Do not call me Marie.

The poem begins with the shameful whitewashing of “Arturo” into “Arthur” and the equally disgraceful scrubbing of “Maria” into “Marie.” As usual, the poet attempts to sanitize or Americanize herself, but remains marked by her “dark Italian eyes.” However, the image of the Italian father, “clean as a cherub,” benevolent and kind, causes her to reject once again the false ideal of Americanness the poet had constructed. The poem ends with the typically upbeat apostrophizing: “Listen, America,” followed by a forceful statement of identification with the Italian father that ends in an affirmation of self and a warning to others: “Do not call me Marie.”  This poem ties Gillan to Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman in its concluding stanza through the breadth of its address. 

One of Gillan’s recent collections, Ancestors’ Song ends with five poems that turn away from broadly addressing American identity. These poems include “My Mother Tells Us Stories of San Mauro,” “This is a Love Song, A Work Song, A Song of Grief,” “Ancestors’ Song,” “Thinking Back, I Remember My Mother,” and “In These Southern Italian Mountains.” Taken together these poems function as a kind of reverse immigration, navigating as they do, the small mountain village in southern Italy where her mother grew up.  As with most of the poems in Maria Gillan’s body of work, these poems also dramatize the processes of remembering. However, the epiphanies that pock the coming of age stories retold time and again in many of her other poems are displaced here by the tranquility of praise. “In These Southern Italian Mountains” ends: “and I feel welcomed in the place, as though my mother/ and father were here with me, leading me home.”   These five poems suggest that the poet has finally come to terms with the tangled skeins of narrative that she has been raveling and unraveling throughout her body of work. 

Ultimately, for Gillan, remembering is an act of love. Imagining her ancestors in San Mauro, Gillan says of their life as farmers:

This is a love song, a work song, a song of grief for the fireplace
in the kitchen in which they cooked their food, the outhouse,
the tin washboard, the hard life they led and did not complain,
a song for the women who bore children in the fields,
who worked until the child was born, and  then rose again 
to work, the crops needing to be harvested and preserved before
winter and the lean times and the family working together
in those fields and kitchens, the parents, grandparents 
and the children, all learning this song of love,
this song of work, this song of grief. 

Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry as a whole is a love song, a work song, a song of grief. Her belief in the power of language to heal and to transform manifests itself in every word. She is a love poet. Her poem “Nighties” is one of the finest epithalamiums in contemporary poetry. In “Watching the Pelican Dies” Gillan dissolves the traditional elegy and converts threnody into ecopoetics.  The elevated simplicity of her poems is a rebuke to the avant-garde entrenched in universities and epitomized by the poetry of opacity and inaccessibility. Maria Gillan’s life work is to welcome and affirm through language, to remember, and through remembering to praise, to persevere, and to preserve. She offers us poetry that we do not so much read as we do feel it in our knuckles.  As she notes in an early poem, “Dawn,” her “house of bones rests/ calm and singing a music all its own.”