Interview with Bill Neumire

How would you describe your writing process? Do you do anything to prepare before starting a new work?

 

For me, writing always comes of reading. I really never sit down and write without reading first. So, in most rooms of my house (and in my car), I have a small stack of books, a marble composition notebook, and a pen. And whenever I get a free moment, I sit, read, and write (always by hand). Later, I type whatever has come into a doc of drafts, and then later still, I work on the bits that seem like they have the most semblance of a whole. I don’t do much separating of projects–all the language accumulates in many different ways–lists of words, lines, phrases, structures, quotations–and veers off, eventually, into separate projects.

 

How have your life experiences informed your writing?

 

At my core, I’m a very social person–I’m always happiest in a group, with friends and strangers, talking, laughing, thinking. I think my social focus in life means that I’m constantly writing in ways that offset that daily extrovert mode to create a balance–writing to reflect the inner, aslant life that is hard to convey in social dialogue. As far as more autobiographical context, I’m sure growing up in the country, having a particularly great circle of friends, teaching, being married, and having kids have all greatly changed the subject matter and perspective of my poems.

 

Do you find yourself inspired by pop culture, artists, films, or media outside the literary sphere? Which have impacted you the most?

 

Indirectly. I’d say I’m intrigued by the lives of strangers, and often that leads me to wonder about famous or famous-adjacent folks. I have poems about Keanu Reeves, Macaulay Culkin, Albert Einstein, Buzz Aldrin, Chris Cornell, Carlo Rovelli. I suppose it’s the people behind the art that inspire me most. My second book of poems, #TheNewCrusades, was a reaction to social media interactions, performances and the way lives fracture between larger and larger dissonance between internal and external personhood.  

 

What direction do you see today’s writing heading? Do you notice any shifts that might come to characterize our time?

 

Great question. I’m of course limited by my own bubbles of reading and experience, but I’ll take a swing: I think poetry has become less overtly lyrical, more often project-based rather than one-page lyric based. The longtime movement away from metrical verse, and then into prosaic forms like the prose poem, the lyric essay, flash fiction have led to fiery debates about how we’d define a poem at all (Annie Finch has some great material on this). I also think the diction and atmosphere of theory and grad programs and, in turn, critiques of that landscape, has saturated much of poetry. I think our time will be marked by this genre fluidity and maybe a healthy breaking of the ways we use genre to make utterly unhelpful distinctions. 

 

Do you believe writers flourish in relative solitude or in groups such as workshops and open mics?

 

Yes to both! Writing requires, it seems, both time alone with one’s thoughts, doubts, feelings, echoic words…but also, writing without audience, without interlocutors and dialogue? Yikes, that’s a dark vision. I don’t think you need institutional or costly connections to other writers. As someone who spent my most formative writing time without any money and lived in the public library, I think it’s feasible and necessary to find camaraderie, education, and dialogue without spending money, to find relationships on equal terms; but make no mistake, the writing world is full of materialism, scams, nepotism, quid pro quo, etc, and maintaining a course that avoids those traps is tough. 

 

How would you describe your style of writing? What led you to this voice?

 

Reaching. I think all my writing is a reflection of a need to put my internal world out in the dark and see if it connects to someone else’s. It’s not unlike any effort to say a prayer, not out of belief, but out of curiosity and hope. 

 

Who are your biggest influences? Why?

 

Early on James Wright because he was the first poet whose work I encountered that taught me poetry could sing the songs of hard, working class towns and the men who abide there. Judith Kitchen was my professor and friend, and she taught me I was a poet, not a frat boy. My friends! Jesse, Jason, Rob, Jake, Mike; they teach me daily that thought, humor, and connection are what writing is for, that all we really have in the end is rare and real connection to others with internal lives. I’ve been lucky enough to share conversation with terrific poets and thinkers that have influenced me by being voices in my ear as I write: Hannah Craig, Sandra Simonds, Patrick Haas, Niesha Trout, Jon Riccio, Summer Hart, Alina Stefanescu, Jennifer Calkins, Jessica Cuello. I love the people I’ve come to know in my writing time, and their biggest influence is a warmth and excitement they help keep alive in me! 

 

What is a poem or a book that you think everyone should read?

Not to be a pain in the ass, but I suppose I’d reject the idea that there is any book that everyone should read. One of the best things about poetry is that it’s such a niche club; in many ways, it’s for the misfits, and as such it rejects the kind of mass-market-book-for-everyone-ness. That said, I’ve returned, for myself, to Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, among others.

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Do you have any other upcoming works? Are there any projects or books you’re working on right now?

Yes! I just wrote my first full-length play: a romantic comedy called Lunchbox, and I’ve got a couple essays, two chapbooks–one an erasure and response to Naked Economics, and another on my grandfather, who caught fire in a construction accident. And this summer, I’m hoping to start piling together and structuring my next full-length poetry manuscript. Plenty to keep me busy.