Visiting with Mark Neely
by Claire Guyton
What’s your best “and that’s how I got the idea for that poem” anecdote?
“Notes from a Tuesday Traffic Jam” began when I was sitting in one of those highway traffic jams where you move about a half-mile in an hour. With the car at a virtual standstill, I grabbed a pen and a map of Illinois (the only paper I could find) from the glove compartment and scribbled down images and fragments as fast as I could until the traffic started to clear.
I think the poem is partly about the expansiveness of the mind (or imagination) even in a very static, boring place. The speaker’s ability to act has been taken away from him (beyond maybe driving off into a cornfield), so all he can do is ponder, reminisce, add up the ledger of his memories.
Tell us about your writing process.
I try to change up my writing process from time to time to access different kinds of material, but recently it seems to work like this: three or four lines of a poem begin to form in my head (often when the sun or the birds wake me earlier than I want), and I start to mull them over. Before I fall back to sleep, I write these initial notes down on paper. Later I write a draft or some notes based on those lines.
I’ve written poems on computers for years, but lately I’ve been working on an old Royal typewriter my wife gave me. Once I have a decent draft on paper, I start hammering things out on the typewriter. I like the messiness of all the typing mistakes and the noisiness of the keys smacking ink into the paper. I go through several drafts, making sure I start each draft at the beginning and working completely through the poem. Ideally, I put the poem away for at least a month, then go back and do more revisions.
Is there something you would love to write a poem about but you can’t? Or something you did write about but you wish you hadn’t?
I’d like to get some good poems based on experiences I had working as a waiter and bartender in Chicago and Philadelphia in my twenties. I met a lot of interesting characters during this time, but they haven’t found their way into my poems just yet.
When I’m writing, I give myself free rein. I try not to censor myself. If I don’t want people to see a particular piece of writing I don’t have to publish it. I’m also able to hide behind the idea of the “speaker” of the poem. My speakers are often based on some part of me, but they aren’t me—so I don’t have to feel responsible for their failings.
Do you have any guilty reading pleasures?
Most of my guilty pleasures are provided by the Internet. Wait, that sounds really bad. Reading on the Internet I mean—gossipy blogs like HTMLgiant (literary) and Deadspin (sports).
