By Millicent Borges Accardi
I met PaulA Neves in 2011 when we were part of the first Writing the Luso Experience class, taught by Frank Gaspar at Disquiet in Lisbon. And, we became fast friends after many adventures with the Kale Soup for the Soul reading series, whose founding members include PaulA, Carlo Matos and Amy Sayre Baptista, with our honorary impresario, Luis Goncalves. Through the years we have given some 40 readings, panels and workshops in the US and Portugal. So, I am very proud to celebrate and interview PaulA Neves for the Portuguese American Journal about her first full-length poetry collection, Passaic (Get Fresh Books).
A Newark, New Jersey-born Luso-American poet, cross-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator, PaulA Neves is also the author of the chapbook capricornucopia: the dream of the goats (Finishing Line Press 2018) and has published work in various journals and anthologies. Her writing awards include a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a New Jersey Poets Prize from The Journal of NJ Poets, and fellowships from the City of Newark, the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, and CantoMundo. She received an MFA in poetry from Rutgers-Newark University and currently teaches English and other courses at Rutgers.
“Rooted in the Portuguese-American experience of Newark’s Ironbound district, an unlevel playing field of immigrant dreams and early deaths, Passaic is a powerful hymn to place and the people we share it with, if only briefly.”
—Theresa Burns, author of Design and Two Train Town
“The places and names in these poems sing to us from long-forgotten memories. Amid all the change the Passaic has seen, this collection reminds us of all the ways “the words will write themselves again,” and expand beyond their immediate geography.” -–Hugo Dos Santos, author of Then, There and translator of A Child in Ruins
In this conversation with Millicent Borges Accardi, PaulA Neves reflects on growing up in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, NJ, and the Portuguese heritage that profoundly shaped her identity as the daughter of immigrants and inspired her poetic voice. She also delves into her approach to poetry, her creative process, and the poets who have influenced her work.
Q: How did you decide on the title for your poetry collection, Passaic?
A: Most of my formative years, as both child and adult, have been spent living, working, and dreaming in and around Newark, New Jersey, and other nearby communities along Passaic River.
This section of it snakes languidly, toxically, and beautifully along familiar vistas of parks, residential areas, factory husks–that impart a sense of home, one that is both comforting and disconcerting. I’m both drawn to it and want to get the hell out, but haven’t been able to. This duality is a recurring theme in my work. What better way to allegorize that than through the Passaic?
Q: You grew up in the Ironbound, can you describe what that was like and how it has shaped you as a writer?
A: I’m still growing up in a Portuguese neighborhood. Only the other Portuguese have died or moved out to the suburbs (some would say that’s the same thing).
Q: Do you attend community events like Portugal Day or Ferry Street?
A: I don’t live in the Ironbound anymore–not the actual geographic place. I’m across the Passaic River in an adjacent town (my parents’ idea of “moving up,” and mine of “moving back”).
But, much of my soul still lives in the Ironbound, and I often think of it as a place beyond borders. Though I often do return to my old haunts–in fact, the house on the cover of my upcoming poetry collection, Passaic, is my childhood home. I attended the first Portugal Day parade as a kid in 1979. (Damn. I’m old.)
In the years since I’ve attended occasionally. I’m much less inclined to be nose-to-armpit in huge crowds, though it still fills me with pride and brings me to tears a little. The Portuguese community is finally on the map in the U.S., thanks to so many writers, artists, musicians, comedians, and professionals from all backgrounds–even political figures (not my favorite group, but I guess they make a contribution), and, most of all, thanks to the unacknowledged everyday work of our antepassados.
I still take friends to favorite Portuguese eateries and shops like Portugalia Sales on Ferry St. (shout out to Tony Roma!). But the area is much less “Portuguese” now. The Portuguese Day Parade, like other ethnic staples, has become a multicultural party. That is America.
Q: I fondly remember a shrimp Mozambique dinner with you and your partner Mary at a Portuguese restaurant within walking distance of your house. O Imperial right? Is that a place you frequent? I felt so honored that you shared it with me.
A: That was a wonderful night. And apparently, you and Mary saw the ghost of my mother there! I was still deep in the throes of grieving my mother’s loss–with that peculiar blend of denial and hope that Joan Didion captures so brilliantly in The Year of Magical Thinking. And it was a magical night! Delicious food, good company, and a ghost! Can’t beat that. The restaurant is still there, but it’s under new ownership–not Portuguese. That’s ok. Things change. And memories are worlds unto themselves, part of why we write.
Q: Shifting gears to the Old Country, is there a place in Portugal you hold close to your heart?
A: My parents’ villages in the Bairrada region (known for wine and roast suckling pig). I was fortunate to spend so much time there in the summers during my formative years–and by formative I mean into my 40s.
Most of the time spent there was long before Portugal was the must-see tourist destination it is now. So, I was able to experience the culture closer to the spirit of what my parents grew up with: the unpaved village streets, single bulb lamp posts festooned with crepe for the summer Festa, using the outhouse, feeding the galinhas and the gado, picking the milho when it was ripe, in days of such intense dry heat that the unpicked oranges on the laranjeiras looked like small suns, and then going out into the cool of nights so blue-black the stars seemed to pull you out into space.
I’m romanticizing of course. And I know those were not the day-to-day experiences (except maybe the outhouse) of lives filled with hard work and the poverty that forced them to emigrate. But I know they had saudades for what I just described too. I inherited it.
Q: What is the Passaic River famous for?
A: In recent decades, for being one of the worst Superfund (EPA cleanup) sites in the U.S. But that’s only one narrative. There are stretches of it that are incredibly beautiful and, in comparison, relatively pristine (by current standards anyway). It’s kind of a potent symbol for New Jersey and America.
Q: Can you describe the community in your collection Passaic?
A: The Portuguese in Passaic, this book, are “manipulated characters” that are extensions of my family, experiences, and inherited memory. Earlier I mentioned that my family of origin was mostly working class. They actually first lived in Hackensack, NJ, not Newark, when they arrived in the U.S.
Hackensack sits on the banks of the Hackensack River, which is part of the Passaic River water basin, and both the Hackensack and the Passaic meet in Newark Bay, which is part of Port Newark-Elizabeth, where my father worked as a longshoreman for over 30 years. Full circle, full confluence.
Q: Passaic, harkens back to William Carlos Williams’ epic poem Paterson (in five volumes, published from 1946 to 1958) also about an area in New Jersey. Did you take inspiration from his work? As an aside, Williams also has Portuguese heritage.
A: If so, I’m not surprised! The Portuguese are such poets at heart, even those like my parents and grandparents who, unlike Williams Carlos Williams, worked in factories, construction or other physical labor that they claimed left no time for “poems.”
Their poems were their calloused hands and their dreams. Paterson was definitely an inspiration, both the poetry and the location. Paterson is in Passaic County. The Passaic River cascades over The Great Falls in Paterson–second only to Niagara Falls for volume east of the Mississippi. Passaic is also an actual city in the same general area.
Driving around here, the word Passaic is everywhere. Free advertising!
Q: What would you say is the central image for Passaic?
A: The word “river” — as a body of water and as a “splitter.” The Lenape word for Passaic is apparently “pahsayèk,” meaning where the land splits. I was drawn to the idea of riving. To write and composing this book involved a lot of riving.
Q: You are also a documentary filmmaker, what aspect of the documentary method have you used in your poetry? Perhaps tying as Williams claimed, “would mirror ” the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city”
A: Williams Carlos Williams was an imagist, right? The method is image. Poetry and documentary filmmaking are not that different.
Q: Who are your writing influences?
A: Emily Dickinson was my first, and remains a primary writing influence. I’m not a fan girl in the sense of knowing every single word she wrote or emulating her style (except maybe using slant rhymes). But what I do know moves me:
“This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me—I feel that. I think most writers do, especially now.”
Other than that, I read eclectically. Right now, on my nightstand are books by Diane Di Prima, Jack London, Deborah Paredez, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Eunice Lipton, Michelle Zauner, and Eileen Myles. And I’m listening to Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield detective novels on the drives home from teaching, to revisit the 1980s and my young queer self.
Q: Sylvia Plath’s work has been described as not confessional but written about “manipulated experiences.” Does that resonate, or is your aesthetic different?
A: Arguably, all of us, as Rick Rubin writes, are creators, regardless of whether or not we identify as artists, and so a life is all about “manipulated experiences.” And now even more so, on the daily, with social media. Aesthetics or capitalism? Poetry is certainly not outside of that.
Q: You often include your Portuguese heritage in your poems: is that a subversive activity?
A: It’s about as subversive as breathing.
Q: What can we do to shed more light on Portuguese writers and artists?
A: Just keep doing our work and citing our influences. Keep connecting with people. Hopefully, our audiences, big or small, will discover something resonant, learn that our homes of origin are destinations for more than just tourism or inexpensive places to retire. And hopefully those of us who teach will be able to continue doing so in the face of uncertainty in education.
Q: In what way do you incorporate real world facts with personal experiences? How do they meld together in your poetry?
A: “They meld in their invented space.” That’s a line from a new poem in the next collection I’m working on, not one from Passaic. But it applies.
Q: Can you share a poem from the collection so our readers can get a taste of the poetry? And maybe say why you chose it?
A: So this is one of my favorites. Passaic ruminates on some serious topics, but this is one of the lighthearted poems that comment on the immigrant experience at a time when I was growing up–and per my students, apparently still resonates. Only the Kmart has been replaced by other stores:
Kmart Pantsuits Picture Day
Velour sweater and polyester,
school-gym-basement-cafeteria;
the yearly lensman said smile—
pretend that sour milk and memory
aren’t artifacts or money.
And for this you left the campo dirt,
let the factory break your back.
Did you misunderstand what Earth is?
Why else buy me Kmart pantsuits
so that everyone in school would know
all the worlds you lost would not
appear with cartoon certainty
in every corner of our house?
Yet, for you, for this, I smiled
like every day was picture day,
and Kmart would never close.
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Upcoming events include a video piece in the Montclair (NJ) Art Museum as part of the NJ Arts Annual show Exploring Our Connections (September 2024-January 2025). Folks can check out PaulA Neves Instagram @itinerantmuse. Passaic is available @ Get Fresh Books Publishing
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Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, including Through Grainy Landscape, 2021 (inspired by Portuguese writings) and Quarantine Highway. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant, and Fundação Luso-Americana (Portugal. She curates the popular Kale Soup for the Soul reading series.
