I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Joining us today is Bill Neumire. Bill is a
poet, editor, and book reviewer living in Syracuse, New York. His most recent
book is #TheNewCrusades, which was a finalist for the Barrow Street Prize and
is available from Unsolicited Press (as well as Barnes and Noble and
Amazon).His first book was Estrus, which was a semifinalist for the 42 Miles
Press Award and is available from Kelsay Books.
Why do you write?
The
most honest but reductionist way I could answer this is to say I can’t not
write. If all sense of “publication” evaporated, I’d still write out of
compulsion, out of need to talk to myself, to respond to thought, feeling,
reading–and ultimately I see writing, especially poetry, as a mode of reading.
So the question goes hand-in-hand with the corollary: why do you read? For me, the answer involves conversation and
examination (ah, that old chestnut about the unexamined life being not worth
living).
When
I was young, a teenager, I remember wondering, genuinely, if adults still had
passionate internal lives–if the apparent drudgery of adulthood, or just time
itself, took that from everyone as they aged. It seems naive now, but I think
it’s a thought some version of which many teens have. And, sadly, I think it’s
sometimes, for some folks, all too accurate. I suppose, then, I write, like a
sign over a door to a secret club, to say, “here I am– an adult who still has
thoughts, feelings, ruminations, an internal struggle that is not connected to
my world of earning a paycheck, doing chores, even conversing politely with
other adults. And I read to see who else is in the club, and what their version
looks like.
What’s something that’s true about
you but no one believes?
I
can never be sure what others believe, but I can say that I never read for
“pleasure,” and that often surprises people. I don’t do “beach reading” or any
version of it. I find reading difficult, and if I’m going to relax, it will be
in some other way–bodily, through television or gaming or socialization. But I
read a lot, all of it out of a compulsion to search and learn. The capacity to
be surprised by knowledge, to absorb some new information or experience that
makes me rethink my take on meaning, life, death–that possibility keeps me
reading. I want to think with thinkers and feel with feelers in hopes that I
move closer to the readiness Hamlet speaks of when he’s confronted with death
and responds, seemingly at peace, by saying, “the readiness is all.”
What’s your kryptonite as a writer?
Well,
I don’t tend to work in projects. Maybe this is a natural outcome of living a
frenetic schedule in which I just don’t have long stretches of uninterrupted
time to write, or maybe it’s just my nature. But I think there’s a disadvantage
to not thinking and writing in book-length or chapbook-length projects, as
opposed to working at the level of the individual poem. If not for this, I
would have written more than two books over the last 25 years.
If you could spend the day with
another author, who would you choose and why?
Carlo
Rovelli. He’s a very literary physicist who writes about his obsession with
understanding time, at the level of physics. Time is an obsession for everyone,
but I think my writing confronts time in ways that make me really interested in
talking to someone who has studied it as a physical phenomenon the way Rovelli
has.
What is your favorite way to waste
time?
When
I was really young–elementary school– I would come home and see my dad, still
in his work clothes from throwing bags of salt at the plant, lying on his back
on the living floor with his eyes closed listening to Bruce Springsteen
records. I’m not sure I believe in the idea of anything truly being “a waste of
time” (see Rovelli), but that use of time is so separate, an antidotal, to the
capitalist ideas of efficient time use, that I love it. And him.
What’s on your literary bucket list?
I
would love to turn my home into a Gertrude-Stein-esque salon for conversation
with poets, artists, and thinkers. Ultimately, it would probably have to be a
separate space than my home (my wife prefers more solitude), but if we’re
talking non-pragmatic aspirations, there you have it. I like that poetry
already exists on the fringes of any kind of “market,” and even in that space,
I rarely think of money or audience when it comes to my writing. It gives me a
kind of freedom, I think, to target what I really value about it: conversation
and proximity with creative minds. The salon would be an ultimate realization
of this.
What would you do if you could live
forever?
Learn
all of the extant languages and try to press rewind on the whole Tower of Babel
situation. I’d also live in every part of the world for at least a year (all of
the potential seasons) and try to have a meaningful series of conversations
with every person I met.
What is under your bed?
What’s the one thing you wish you
knew when you were younger?
I
worried a lot when I was younger, mostly about some version of the future. I
still do, I suppose, but it feels different–more subdued and informed–now. I
wish I knew, in a way talking can never convey, that everything was going to be
just fine.
What scares you the most?
The
non-literary answer that is most true is that something terrible will happen to
my children. On a more writerly level, the idea of losing all of my
interlocutors; aging is a wild path of loss in many ways, and I’ve never been
more vicariously sad than being in the presence of someone older than me who
says they’ve lost all of the people closest to them. In some ways, I guess,
living a literary life is a force field against that kind of loneliness: if you
are in a large conversation with other writers, with books, with friends and
family, it’s less likely you ever have no one left to talk to.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The news in #TheNewCrusades is
professed through protests, graffiti, broken mirrors, ambient radio,
synchronized fires, and all-night newsfeeds--all of it projecting a cryptic and
indefinable set of rules that churn about as permutations of some lost
algorithm. These poems address a tamed violence held barely in check, examining
masculinity and fatherhood and the undercurrents of suburban domesticity. In
the end, they are a barrage of cries at breaking the boundary between you and I, questions rising into prayers
that ask, are we closed or open systems? Can we really
know each other at all?
buy a copy here:
https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/store/p375/THENEWCRUSADES.html
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