Mark Neely is the author of five books of poetry, a professor of English at Ball State University, and a senior editor at River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. His work includes an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist grant, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Concrete Wolf Press Chapbook Award. Neely’s poetry collections Four of a Kind, Beasts of the Hill, Dirty Bomb, and Ticker are thoughtful works of poetry that challenge the dreariness of life. His most recent book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021
Why did you choose to write poetry instead of fiction or another genre? What is it about poetry that’s drawing you into it?
As a kid, I always liked to write, but just sort of randomly, I never really focused on anything. Then, in high school, I started reading more and began writing a little bit of poetry here and there. There was a class I had in high school. And we had an assignment. I think it was on The Great Gatsby or something like that. We could either write a paper or we could do something creative. And I was like, well, the poem’s a lot shorter than a paper. So it was kind of laziness that got me to write a poem. I really enjoyed it. And I worked really hard on it. It probably didn’t take as long as maybe writing a paper, but it did take a long time.
When I got to college was when I really got into poetry. I had a couple of amazing teachers at the University of Illinois. One of them was Bridget Kelly, an amazing poet. And she really started to show me some of the poets that I’m still reading today, like James Wright, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop. I really started to understand how much a poem can hold in a few lines. In a page, writing can hold so much interesting language, interesting ideas, and weird thoughts. And I was really attracted to that. I took a fiction class, but it didn’t feel natural to me. I never really had great plot ideas. And poetry utilizes more image-based language, so I was more attracted to that side of it.
You mentioned that you had your three teachers in Illinois, that were big inspirations. Is there anything that occurred in high school or college that continues to push you and inspire you today, a moment where you realized poetry is something that you want to make a career out of?
Now that I think about it, when I was in college, I was super into music. I played music. I was in a band. We did some recordings, played some shows. I was totally obsessed with that. But I was also writing poems, but also writing song lyrics. Maybe a year after we graduated, the band dissolved. I was starting to feel some frustration with the dynamic of a band, which is very collaborative; everyone has to be on board. Poetry is something I could do on my own. I didn’t have to worry about wrangling other people. I could play music by myself, but I didn’t have the same outlet for creating music for other people. And I’ve always wanted to do that: making art and making things. So that’s when I threw myself into poetry.
I just was writing poems for several years and doing odd jobs, like working in restaurants, doing house painting, random jobs, and really focusing on writing and reading as much as I could. And that’s when I thought; I want to go to grad school. I don’t think there was a creative writing major at my school. I wasn’t surrounded by a ton of writers. Most of the people I knew were in architecture school. So they were artistic in a way, but they didn’t understand poetry, you know. So I wanted to go to grad school because I wanted to be around many people who cared about the same things as me. So that was kind of a journey: write poetry, get serious about it, learn as much as I can, and surround myself with people who care about it.
Where did you go to grad school?
I went to the University of Alabama. I applied to a lot of places, and I got into a few. Alabama had a really good literary magazine. They had good funding. So I was going to get paid to go to school, not like a ton of money. I wouldn’t have to pay tuition and stuff like that. That was super attractive. And I liked the people there. It turned out to be a great place for me.
As you’ve developed as a poet and have continued to write, do you find yourself writing for yourself? Or do you find yourself writing for that target audience?
That’s a good question. I’m always writing for others.There’s a lot of people that write poems all the time, and barely anyone ever sees them. They just write them in their notebooks. And that’s a personal thing. It’s almost like a diary. And that’s a great practice; it can be fulfilling. But I’ve always wanted to make art for an audience and wanted to have interaction with people who read the work.
But I’m not thinking about the audience when I’m writing. Writing is very solitary and personal for me. I’m writing for myself, but I am not writing just for myself and my target audience. It’s hard to say like, I mean, I think I imagined, like certain readers connecting to my poetry. And, you know, I’m like a 50-year-old guy, so I think young people won’t be interested in this because they’re not interested in my 50-year-old stuff. But many really connected with it. My mom is 83, and she likes to read a couple of books of mine with some friends of hers. And they’ve connected with it in interesting ways. Of course, my mom’s going to enjoy my poetry, but her friends have talked to me about it and they’re from a different generation. So it’s almost impossible to project who will connect with your work.
One thing that is really interesting to me, when I was working on Ticker and Dirty Bomb, is some of the poems that I was most uncomfortable with, I don’t want a lot of people to see this. For various reasons, they were the ones people seemed to like the most. I think it was about risk and revealing some parts of myself I didn’t want to show the world. I’m a pretty private person, too.
Would you consider yourself a stream-of-consciousness poet? Or is it more of a reflection on past changes in life through your work? Are you working through stuff as you write?
I never thought of it as a stream of consciousness, exactly. But it is sort of like that when I’m writing. I never really sit down and think I want to write a poem about love. Or I want to write a poem about having children. I never think about the subject, I always think about the words. So what will happen is some line will come to mind. Or I’ll see something out on the street and want to describe it. It starts from something very small. I mean, you’ve read my poems. Some of them are fairly straightforward. And some of them are a lot more like meditative, where they jump from one thought or one image to the next. It depends on the poem. I am always figuring out what I’m writing, while writing it. And then I do a ton of revision.
The first draft I want to get some words on this page, not trying to think too hard about whether it’s good or not, or whether it’s interesting or whether it even makes sense. And then when I go back, I kind of know certain things to look for. And I just revise and revise and revise until I’m really happy with every line, until I feel like every line is contributing something, every line is leading to the next line in an interesting way. That’s just my, like, rambling thoughts. So yes, it’s a weird process. I don’t exactly know where the stuff comes from.
That answers it really well. There’s a balance and flow between some of your work.
Oh, good, good. There is a technical term flow. You get it in sports. You get it in writing, too, where you lose time and you’re not consciously thinking. You’re just doing. That’s one of the greatest feelings. That’s one of the reasons to write. To have that feeling.
Which is probably why I like to pitch. There are some other things that I enjoy doing just because it’s very meditative.
You get in that groove, and the pitches are hitting the spots. You’re not thinking, you’re not aiming, you’re letting it all hang out. And that’s just the greatest feeling in the world. And then you start to think about it and everything goes to hell. It’s a lot like writing.
Yeah. I’ve been learning that more and more. I wonder if there is an inspiration behind Bruce? I loved the recurring theme of Bruce in Ticker and some of the other characters.
Most of the poems are spoken by someone a lot like me. Using Bruce, having this character to stand in for me, was really freeing for me. I didn’t worry as much about what people were gonna think of me. People are gonna think that’s Bruce. It’s a way of writing personal stuff without fear. He’s fictional, so I could exaggerate certain things.
As far as the name goes, Bruce used to be Frank, my father’s middle name. It was a private joke in my head. So my father’s name was Frank Wright Neely. It was his first name, but no one ever called him that. They call him Wright, his middle name. No one knew his name was Frank. A secret name. I wanted a name from an older generation. Bruce is kind of old fashioned. And then there’s a poet named CA Conrad, who was working on this book that came out with a book called The Book of Frank. And so I changed my character to Bruce.
In the poem “Subvocal (Hadley)” you write: “They say everyone wants to be an artist. Not me. I want to be debonair. I want to rise on a throne of fire” By setting up this comparison, what note are you trying to strike in the reader?
That’s a great question. A lot of people think, if you’re making art, then it is genuinely good. It can’t be bad or evil. But of course, Hitler was an artist. That was on my mind when I was thinking about that. And the Virginia Tech shooter was in creative writing classes and the shooting was so profoundly moving and upsetting to me. Things like that might happen in my own life. I’m an English professor myself. Those lines you quoted were a little bit of frustration with the place art has in American society, especially visual arts, poetry, and literary writing. They’re secondary in the culture. Compared to pop music, movies, television, all the things people consume. In some ways, that’s great. I don’t have to worry about a producer coming to tell me I need to change my poem because the target audience is not going to like it or something. But in some ways, it’s frustrating. I see people getting famous doing some ridiculous Tik Tok stuff. Part of that frustration is wondering, what is poetry in the 21st century in the United States? Will it have any sort of impact?
