N.J. finds its poetic voice in historic Paterson

Late in the 18th century, Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary, looked at the 70-foot Great Falls in Paterson and dreamed of American's first planned industrial city.

One hundred fifty years later, William Carlos Williams looked at the same falls and dreamed a poem:

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passiac Falls

its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He

lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams. . .

The water still thunders today in Paterson and it still powers many a poet's dreams, but no longer does it drive the old textile, locomotive, and firearm manufacturing that attracted immigrants from every corner of the world. Although its time as an industrial giant has passed, the mammoth mills stand guard over the falls and the immigrant workers’ descendants are now the poets that write about Paterson.

Poetry has never left New Jersey's third largest city, having been influenced by Williams, native Allen Ginsberg, and now nurtured by Maria Maziotti Gillan, executive director at The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College and a professor at (SUNY) Binghamton University. She too was born in the city, at her home on Fifth Avenue, and has written eight books of poetry.

"The doctor never arrived on time and my mother was home alone when I was born," Gillan said. "I don't know how she stayed so calm, she even had to cut the cord herself."

Poetry Center keeps a full calendar

The Poetry Center was Gillan's own baby, beginning in 1980 with grant support from the New Jersey Council of the Arts. She too had to pretty much be her own midwife, growing from a few back shelves of the PCCC library to the historic Hamilton Club Building on Church Street, where the Distinguished Poets Series holds four readings and accompanying workshops each year.

 

"I wanted to have a poetry center in the inner city that would bring distinguished poets who spoke very directly to people," Gillan said. "I wasn't interested in poets writing for other poets."

The Poetry Center also hosts the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest and Reading as well as poetry conferences and the Paterson Prize for Books For Young People. Each year it attracts poets throughout New Jersey and nationally for publication in The Paterson Literary Review, a New Jersey Poetry Resource Book, a statewide Poetry Calendar, and anthologies such as The Poetry of Place: North Jersey in Poetry.

2009 Awards Reading reaches around the country

On November 7, the 2009 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards and Reading recognized 26 poets from as close as Morristown, Nutley, and Highland Park, and as far afield as California, Oregon, and Florida.

Gail Fisher Gerwin, now from Morristown, was one of those poets who grew up in Paterson in an immigrant neighborhood where her parents still spoke Yiddish to keep secrets from the children. Her Honorable Mention poem My Parents' Tongues immortalized an experience you don't have to be from Paterson to appreciate.

. . . We'd know when the

unspeakable was happening in the family

from their whispers, hushed tones meant

to keep the children - kinderlakh -

from hearing that Aunt Chana's heart stopped,

that Hitler had stolen a brother, a sister,...

 

And as Gillan has stated, the 2009 Allen Ginsberg Poetry winners are poets that talk to people, not just other poets. Maxine Susman, a poet from Highland Park, read about one of her last visits to her mother in an old age home in Back From Seoul; while second prize winner Josh Humphrey from Kearney wrote of his infant being born on what would have been his grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Gail Gasper from Metuchen reminisced about her childhood neighbor in Mr. Rossi Raised Pigeons. Other poets wrote about football and ex-spouses and even finding old boyfriends on the Internet, as in The Chapter Between by North Plainfield’s Linda Radice.

For many who grew up in Paterson and have moved on, The Poetry Center has helped them to return to their roots with the catalyst of poems.

"It is truly gratifying to see a gem like the Poetry Center in the heart of my hometown of Paterson," Gail Fishman Gerwin said. "Being in the company of other winning poets and with Maria, whose words and recognition by the literary community truly inspire, provides all of us with the ongoing challenge to write better."