All Faculty Profiles
Mary Donnelly
by Talia Skaistis
“Think of the music!”
This is what longtime Gotham Poetry teacher, Mary Donnelly, tells her students to do when sitting down to write a poem. “Use your imagination—pretend you are an alien or something, seeing a ceiling fan for the first time.”
Mary initially found herself drawn to poetry through her love for music. “As a teenager, I remember discovering music I liked and thinking it was the most amazing thing I ever heard,” she says. “And then when I discovered the poetry that I liked, I thought of it as emotion through the music of language. The words, the sounds, how you move across the page, it all works together.”
Mary grew up in a small fishing town on the California coast. You can see it in her writing; images of the sea and the shore are intertwined with metaphorical commentary on environmental issues and politics. For Mary, poetry is a canvas for not only exploring the people, places, and images that she loves, but also a tool used for larger societal observation.
As a college student, she was invigorated by poets like Wisława Szymborska, Pablo Neruda, and by various Soviet writers, “who used science fiction, surrealism, satire, and metaphor to attack larger subjects and get away with it.”
“I am drawn to anything that feels wry and wise,” Mary says. “I like writers who come at important subjects in alternate ways.”
Mary has been living in New York City for 40 years. She has taught at Gotham for 22 of those. She encourages her students to approach writing from a place of curiosity and admiration.
“I find that I can use the advice I am giving my students on my own work… I get a lot of inspiration from teaching.”
When Mary isn’t writing, teaching, or video editing, you can find her drawing little comics, putting on a good horror movie, exploring New York’s museums and parks, or just hanging out at home with her partner, Peter, and their two cats. You will always catch Mary with a notebook on her, ready to write down what she experiences—images, sounds, and passing characters to include in her poems.
What should you do when you are feeling stuck? Mary advises us to take the pressure off.
“People get caught up in things having to be a grand gesture, instead of talking about things they really love. We think writing has to be perfect and big and giant… but when it comes to poetry, take something that interests you, and try to see it with all your senses. Think about it with the music, imagine it as something else. Sit down, time yourself, and just write.”
