A conversation with Paul Cordeiro on class, compression, and the relationship between private memory and public history in his new chapbook, Textile City Memories, published by Analog Submission Press.

These poems are rooted in a very specific place. What has your relationship to the city been over the years?

I grew up on the city line. Married to a city librarian, I later lived for seventeen years near the Rural Cemetery and not far from the downtown historic district of New Bedford, Massachusetts — never far from cobbled streets, mills, people, and the sea.

Many of these poems move between personal memory and public history — a radio host ranting, gang signs on telephone wires, a zoo renovation. How do you think about that movement between the private and the civic?

The personal blends with the civic and the historic. A kind of continuum develops as the free verse takes shape and makes a whole.

There is a strong sense of class running through the collection — homelessness, sweatshops, panhandlers swept away like litter. Is that something you set out to write about, or did it simply come with the territory?

My parents were millworkers. You can’t help but notice the injustices done to the downtrodden. These textile city memories begin with my blue-collar roots.

Several poems work through compressed storytelling — “dinner date” and “what young men should know” in particular feel like whole narratives in just a few lines. Do the poems begin in that short form, or do you cut them down to it?

The poems arrive short, pithy, like imagist pile-up collages. Often they need only a finishing line or two, and a title, to complete the effect. Sometimes, though, I become aware that compression needs to open out a little to make a stronger argument.

The poem “wonders” places a whaling captain’s manor beside your companion’s green eyes. That movement from historical grandeur to personal intimacy is very quiet but striking. Is that kind of juxtaposition something you think about consciously?

Every individual has a unique view of the world. I’m looking at domestic tranquillity through her green eyes, while also feeling the dynamics of our relationship, the heartbeat of history, and the beauty of the rose garden facing south-east towards the sun at the Rotch-Jones-Duff House on County Street.

“the town next door’s water department report” reads almost like found poetry — bureaucratic language turned absurd and then sinister. What drew you to that form?

I’ve been drawn to found pieces ever since learning about verse satire and workshopping found poetry in college creative writing classes. You find poetic absurdity in bureaucratic speech, from Three Mile Island, 9/11, and Katrina to our own local water problems. Those go deep, down to PCBs and the dredging of the Acushnet River after years of factory pollution.

You write both haiku and longer free verse. How do those two practices feed each other?

Many haiku are action enough to set one image against another in a single moment of observation. Sometimes an intuition emerges from that, and I build a hybrid free verse poem from those leaping-off points into stronger emotion and situation.

Memory is central to this collection — the title makes that clear. Do you trust your memory, or are these poems a way of testing it?

I trust my memory because I was there. The harder part is making a poem from that memory that feels complete and memorable in itself.

This is your third chapbook with Analog Submission Press, after Scratch Card and Do Not Touch. How has your writing changed since those earlier books?

Scratch Card was imagist, with a sparse music of action in couplets. In Do Not Touch, many of the selected poems were biographical sketches and personal situations — a tenement house fire in 1964, or my father deciding to plant a crabapple tree that would need little care at the new house. At the old homestead, we had apple and pear trees that my immigrant grandfather tended. Everything blends in memory, and I began writing early free verse poems about people close to me. Now I’m more aware of the blue-collar community and of a stronger narrative force that is not just whimsy. That is where the history of the textile city comes in, to counterbalance the personal.

If a reader were to begin with one poem in the collection, which would you suggest, and why?

It might be fun to read “gang sign, 1996” first. It sums up the atmosphere at night where we lived for seventeen years on the first floor of a three-storey tenement house. We raised two young children there, and we wanted a stop sign at the corner to slow the traffic.

Textile City Memories is available to pre-order now. The chapbook launches next Wednesday, 29 April. Pre-orders include two A6 mini broadsides featuring artwork from Paul Cordeiro’s earlier Analog Submission Press chapbooks, Scratch Card and Do Not Touch.

Pre-order here →

Marc Brüseke | Editor
Analog Submission Press
York, England
analogsubmission.com