We had the privilege of sitting down to chat with Tim Neil about their shower thoughts, irons in the fire, being non-binary, and their mega-rad forthcoming poetry collection Self-titled by Alien (Milk Carton Press, spring 2022).
What do you want to tell the world about yourself? Any fun facts???
I have a cat named Squid, who is quite the devil but also quite the charmer, as the devil would be, and I’m terrible with fun facts. Any time there’s an icebreaker game I dread it. I was afraid of thunderstorms for a really long time, it seemed like there was always one on my birthday. When I was nine, and I was terrified of tornadoes, but I’m from Baltimore where they like never happen, but when I was nine on my birthday it didn’t storm and my mother was tucking me into bed and she was like “see, look, no storms!” and we were like “yay!” and lo and behold, within like ten minutes the winds picked up and the sky turned green and generators started exploding and it was horrifying.
Tell us about your life currently and what brought you here.
Currently I’m going into the second year of the MFA at Bowling Green State University, and that was kind of like a lucky break, last summer I didn’t expect to be going into a grad program but an extra spot opened up and I jumped at the opportunity, coming from this last year and a half working at a grocery store, and as you can imagine working at a grocery store during COVID was not the funnest place, but ya gotta do what you gotta do. And I live with an amazing partner, and yeah that’s my life currently.
Why the MFA? What are you planning on in the future?
The MFA was just kind of because I’m interested in the possibility of teaching down the road in some capacity, coming from and undergrad in acting and a master’s degree in poetry I need at least one somewhat steady job prospect as I move forward on this earth, and also because I never really had that much formal training about writing and I want to master the craft. And thinking about the future, I’m open to teaching in the future, I think I ‘d enjoy it and could do some good with it. And you know that poetry is constant for me, I have another manuscript I’m working on, the Deadbook project, but also would like to do screenwriting and acting in film, a lot of stuff. I tend to have too many pokers in the fire at once.
Talk about your current projects.
I’m currently working on a small chapbook of previously published poems from magazines, basically outtakes, stuff that never really fit in a collection. Throwing that together and am gonna release it as a pdf and an audiobook, I have like six songs I’ll add to it. And also two to three showers out of the week I spend the time thinking about a film adaptation for Sam Shepard’s play A Lie of the Mind and how it would work, which is the least working way about working on a project, but I care a lot about it and am gonna make it happen.
What got you into poetry?
I mean, poetry was on my mind pretty early in life because I come from a really artistic household, and my mom introduced us to music and writers and a whole bunch of things, so poetry was always cool in my mind. Then when I got to high school I started to play at learning guitar and writing songs and I continued that for a long time but I was never really that good at it, and my second to last semester of undergrad I had to take a course, one of those financial aid rules to get full-time, and took a poetry course on a whim with Joseph Capista, and I wrote really shitty, weird, experimental poetry, but he liked it and said you should take the next class in the fall with Leslie Harrison and yeah, it sort of just propelled from there. But I’m giving way too linear of an explanation of it, there’s a lot of different factors, but there were some landmark moments. I think it was specifically that my relationship with words had to change before I got there. When I was younger my primary way of receiving poetic thought was through songs, so I thought the way I had to communicate it would be singing it, and by having a cool vibe, and by having a cool guitar, but I think that once I took that first class with Joe, and he has a particular way of reading, very distinctive voice, and taking a class with him and hearing him read and break down poems, I do think that started to really change my relationship with words. And I think also because I was raised Catholic, part of me wonders that, because there’s such elevated language in the bible, and religious stuff in general, was it that because of my early experiences with elevated language being with religion, which I ultimately threw off, that I needed a change of poetic perspective. Was it that when I threw off religion I threw off a comfort with elevated language and poetic thought? That may be.
Why do you keep writing poetry?
Ugh, I feel like it’s the hackneyed thing to say “‘cause I have to,“ but it’s ‘cause I have to, it’s sort of become part of my living routine, my thinking routine. When I write, when I live, I’m just out doing things, and when I see things it’s all sort of just input into the data computer of the brain that just starts to percolate, and then I sit down to write. Also, I just like to do it: that feeling of creating something and taking random, raw pieces of life, and not raw in terms of emotionally raw, just like crude materials, straight from life experiences, and forging them into something I feel is worth saying. Whether or not they are is another matter. And I think that when the time comes if I’m doing it out of pure routine, or if it’s not fun anymore, I hope I’ll do something else.
What do you write about?
I feel like I’ve noticed a lot lately that, and I’ve noticed it as I’ve been revising, I think I write a lot about the contradictions, whether it’s people, and maybe not contradictions but duality, but how something, very similar to eastern thoughts about something holding a little bit of its opposite within it, I think that’s something for whatever reason keeps showing up. And to be honest I think that’s a common concept for poets to write about: here is one thing, but it’s also its exact opposite, so it’s not that complex of at trick I guess, but other than that I write about things i find beautiful in one way or another, be it a great moment or something else. And I don’t know how to answer this question without seeming like I’m self-fellating.
Where does your identity sneak into your writing?
The ego or the subconscious has it’s fingerprints all over everything I do. It can be as explicit as me being nonbinary and learning how to love myself, or being a privileged white person, or being an American citizen, or being a person who’s probably in the last few generations of living a life on this earth when it’s not going to be fucking miserable environmentally. I feel pretty strongly that the identity of a poet is naturally going to be in every poem. And some people can be really subtle about it, it can work for them, but for me I’m much less subtle about it, I tend to vomit myself all over my poems.
How much of Self-titled by Alien was inspired by your journey with being non-binary? Or was that realization already cemented long before writing the book?
I would say it was entirely unnamed in me for a long time, but I’ve always felt different. Sometimes it feels like, when I’m explaining my identity, that it’s a superhero origin story, and I don’t know how to make it not sound that way. “And then one day…” ha but yeah, I don’t know, I was always a bit off, more sensitive, never felt that I prescribed to certain ideas about what this person or that person is. For me, my body has always been this thing I’ve been plopped into, never been connected to it. And that feeling has always been there. That overall feeling of being at a distance from my own self in some ways, or more so distant from how I was perceived, I guess that’s been the driving factor that’s present throughout the book.
What other roles does being non-binary play in your writing and life? Anything else you want to share about it?
It’s an ongoing journey, not something that I — and it worries me sometimes that I don’t know how to manifest it physically though, like in order for it to be true. I go through spells where I need to do like the smokiest eye today to expect to be seen as nonbinary, but I don’t necessarily want to do that, but I feel like I have to, and I worry with this book, with writing about it, I worry that it’s gona be seen as me like bullshitting it, becasue there are people out there who view it as a popular thing to write about, think this is someone coming in and co-opting it, and I think that’s fair because there is a history of people doing that, of taking other people’s issues and exploiting it, humans are shitty like that, but I sort of have to just trust and know that my own experience is my own experience and my own life is mine to talk about and to write about.
Why did you write Self-titled by Alien?
I didn’t go into it thinking “I’m gonna write this,” this wasn’t a project book. I got into poetry during undergrad. Started to write it because there were things in my life that I wanted to write about. I had some supportive professors and met some influential people who supported my writing so I kind of just kept doing it. Years later here we are. I just wrote it because I had to write some poems. When you are writing there’s a theme that comes up, one to three concepts you are trying to sort out, and I feel these poems all work together thematically that way from what was going on in my life at the time. Four years of poems all just came together.
Inspirations? Influences? Where were you drawing from?
In terms of specific poets I would say that probably the books, the poets I read in my undergrad, C. Dale Young, Terrance Hayes, Meg Freitag, Solmaz Sharif, those poets, they were the first books I really read seriously with poetry, and then also I feel like some of the poems from Baltimore, being from there, being introduced to Edgar Allan Poe at a really young age, my worldview in terms of poetics were a bad mimic of some of his poetry. And also I owe to those who taught me writing, they really shaped me: my high school teacher, Vincent Fitzpatrick, my mother Kathleen Neil, who was my first real writing teacher, and also my professor Leslie Harrison, to my friend Alison Hazle, a fantastic poet in her own right, because Leslie and Alison were the two most prominent voices when I was starting to write so they had a lot of authority in that right.
To you, what is this book about?
Sighs, thinks. It’s probably about not knowing who you are, but also knowing, well, you are the one who knows yourself most intimately but at the same time you can have no idea who you are. And I guess too it’s like aging into knowing yourself. I’m twenty-six years old and I feel I don’t know anything about myself. I feel like an orb just walking in a strange body I was dropped down into, and that can have its joys, its problems, but you know, growing up Catholic and queer, non-binary, these things have dissonance, they pull, they identify you but they also cancel out and leave you feeling like, “what am I?” And it’s also about looking at the world and not knowing it, a lot of question marks, not a lot of answers. Not sure if the book is really about that, but that’s what it feels like to me.
Tell us about your experience writing it.
The first poem that I wrote that is in it, I think it’s called “Don’t cry if you read this…” which was a poem I wrote because I was seeing someone at the time and was head over heels for this person and I, it’s like the cliche of the young artist being in love and writing a poem for their muse and their muse being like “I could cry” so I wrote a poem that’s like “don’t.’” When I think about these poems I feel vulnerable because I don’t have the armor of the idea that you can have when you are writing a project, because you are approaching from more of an intellectual, sort of blacksmithian type of mind, but all of these poems are very much from the emotional, from, well, I was just living a life and there were things that happened to me that made me happy or bothered me or made me really sad and I wrote about them, and I think that was my experience. These are honestly just really emotional poems, literally because they came from the emotions and I’m an emotional, dramatic person.
What would your back cover blurb say? Try and distill your book into one sentence.
(sighs, very long pause) I think something about, I don’t know, I have this image in my mind that’s like, “The stranger interrogating and writing love letters to their own strangeness,” or something. Did that make any sense?
(it makes total sense once you read the book)
Tim Neil is a poet and actor from Baltimore, MD. Their work has appeared in Poet Lore, The Fiddlehead, Los Angeles Review, Washington Square Review, and Pidgeonholes, among others. They are a co-founder of Greatest City Collective, which seeks to celebrate the artistic process through its online mag Greatest City Diary, as well as their podcast, Bus Ride Talks. Their lo-fi audio chapbook of outtakes and songs, Bolton Babies, is forthcoming. Currently, they are an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where they are at work on a manuscript exploring suicidal ideation, and its relationship with life, both on earth and beyond.
