L'Italo-Americano

www.italoamericano.org 10 THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 2019 L'Italo-Americano KENNETH SCAMBRAY P erhaps by this point Maria Gillan does not need an introduction to a North American Italian reading audi- ence. She has published more than twenty books of poems, has been the mentor for hundreds of poets through her writing semi- nars at Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College and at Binghamton Center for Writ- ers where she is professor of English at Binghamton Universi- ty, SUNY. What has alw ays dis tin- guished her poetry, from her very first work to her latest, What Blooms in Winter, is her unsparing honesty in her con- frontation of some of the most intimate details of family life and her struggles as an Italian American girl growing up in New Jersey in the years after World War II. It is understand- able that, as a daughter of Italian immigrants, the family would be at the center of her poetry. Her poetry has always taken great risks: exposing the guilt she feels over betraying her immigrant parents in the face of her girl- hood effort to assimilate into American life, to her personal trials with her grown children and now deceased husband. It is not often in American poetry, w hich has veered in recent decades towards the uni- vers ity w orks hop poetry of abstraction, that we can read lines of such conflicted emotion- al depth. In one of the nearly seventy poems in What Blooms s he w rites about her grow n daughter, betrayed by love and divorced, but now in love again, and how s he hopes for her renew al w ith a new family. Risky, maybe, to write so truth- fully about someone so close to you as a mother and writer? In What I Can't Tell My Son, she opens up about her conflict- ed relationship with her son, about their occas ional "10- minute phone calls , thos e painful, awkward attempts at touch." In another, she remi- nisces about her deceased hus- band who has "crossed over / to that other place where I cannot touch you . . . where I hope you can feel me missing you." In ear- lier books she discussed her ambivalent feelings towards him, in a confessional style that left nothing out. In other poems, she addresses a familiar theme of all her work: her struggles as the daughter of working-class immigrant par- ents, who spoke Italian-accented English, and with growing up in an America that, at the time, did not honor difference. There was no "multi" prefix attached to "culture," then. S he lived between two worlds. The titles of her poems suggest the con- flict: The Clothes I Wore in High School, At the Factory Where My Mother Worked, I Was a Good Italian Girl, Bell Bottoms and Platform Shoes, Bookbags and Galoshes. The emotions expressed in her poetry are continuous ly informed by her memory of the pas t, of a now -dis appeared immigrant culture that was in conflict with her adolescent desire to fit into modern Ameri- can life. Though Gillan certainly has found her way into a suc- cessful life, her poems express, nevertheless, a loss of that past. In them, she writes about lost family rituals (Christmas Eve at Our House), and about the pass- ing of the old immigrant genera- tion (The D ead S it Calmly Among us): "I want to believe you are s till s itting calmly / among us, that I could reach out my hand / and touch the high cheekbone of your face." The voice in her poems is adrift in modern life. Her sense of loss connects with a tradition- al theme in Italian American lit- erature, that of the loss coming with immigration's wrenching personal and cultural dislocation in America. This is, indeed, a topos of nearly all immigrant lit- erature: William Saroyan from Fresno wrote poignantly about the great loss that his Armenian ancestors suffered upon their forced immigration and settle- ment in the U S . A s s oon as immigrants settled in the promise land, they began constructing idealized images of their villages - no matter how poor they were in the old world - and, in the case of the Armenians, also of the suffering they endured. That is one of the essential conundrums running throughout Italian American literature, too. The strength of Gillan's poet- ry is that it is also a poetry of place. There are times when I hear the voice of American poet Phil Levine in her works poems. In one of her last books, she accompanies her poems with her original watercolors, visceral and colorful depictions of women. This time she has set her New J ers ey poems next to M ark Hillinghouse's stunning black and white photographs. M aria's poem The Y oung Men in Black Leather Jackets "who stood for hours / in the front of the candy store / on 19th Street and 2nd Avenue / in Pater- son, New Jersey" is opposite Hillinghouse's stark, ominous black and white urban scene of four young people on a street corner, the street sign Do Not Enter captured in the photo. A photograph of the portal of School Number 18 is set next to Maria's well-known poem Pub- lic School No. 18, Paterson, New Jersey, where teachers in word and ges ture told M aria, the young w orking clas s Italian American girl, "to be ashamed." A nother, D addy, We Called You, about her working-class immigrant father, is next to a stark tenement building, with a worker cleaning the factory's windows under a fire escape that zig zags up the side of it. It is urban America, stark but offer- ing work to immigrants. Maria's paean to the Passaic River is next to Hillinghouse's contemplative shot of the river under a gray, cloudy sky. The image evokes memories, as Maria's poems recall her father's immigrant past. Maria Gillan is without argu- ment the most prominent Italian American writer in the US. She has won many prizes for her work, including the American Book Award. Her more than twenty-one books have chroni- cled the Italian immigrant and post-immigrant experience in America as no other contempo- rary poet has. Paterson Light and Shadow. Poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, photographs by Mark Hillinghouse. What Blooms in Winter. Poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan LIFE PEOPLE MOVIES MUSIC BOOKS

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