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 By Karen Sharpe
Ann Neelon ’77 quotes William Butler Yeats when identifying the source of her connection to poetry.
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” Yeats said.
For Neelon, growing up as one of seven children in a busy household meant a scarcity of the solitude often required for introspection and the delving into the imagination. But during summers spent at a Boston-area beach Neelon explored her “quarrel with herself”—especially during the long hours at night, with the surf pounding the shore outside her window.
“I trace any early sense of myself as a poet to those hours of wakefulness,” she says.
Neelon’s poetry is widely published—and she is the author of an award-wining collection Easter Vigil. Her most recent endeavor, however, is not as writer but as the editor of a new, national literary journal, New Madrid, launched this past spring by Murray State University in Kentucky.
Though Murray State has a rich history of fostering writers, including poets Jorie Graham and James Galvin, it had lacked a structured program. Neelon came to Murray in 1992 and, since then, she, along with other faculty members, have developed the creative writing program through the implementation of curriculum changes, a reading series and an annual writing symposium. The culmination of the years of work is the recent creation of a low-residency master of fine arts program and the launching of New Madrid.
Actually, it’s a re-launching—New Madrid was published once in 1991; after the editor left, it lay dormant until Neelon worked to revive it. With internships for the M.F.A. program tied into the journal’s production, Neelon is confident it will have a fruitful life. Likewise, she believes that, even as the digital, wireless and paperless world grows by leaps and bounds, there is a special place for the written word and literature.
“Language is power,” she says. “Writers will always be trying to wield it, whether via the oral tradition, as Homer did in addressing the ravages of the Trojan War, or via the Internet, as American writers did in attempting to articulate the unspeakable losses of 9/11.”
Writing is a vehicle for action as well, Neelon believes. While she was a student at Holy Cross, Professor Emese Soos introduced her to the notion of “art for art’s sake,” during a 19th-century French poetry class. From there, Neelon began to contemplate what she calls “art for people’s sake,” where she could venture into the political and the moral—and where she found her voice as a writer.
Neelon came of age in Boston during the busing crisis. After graduating from Holy Cross, she became a Peace Corps volunteer and college teacher in Fatick, Senegal.
“In retrospect, I believe I chose to go to Africa to regain my innocence,” she says. “I needed to put myself on the line somehow to invest in a better world, specifically a world in which white people and black people could live together amicably.”
Neelon wants New Madrid to be a place where new writers, exploring similar experiences, will find a home for their works.
“My highest hope for New Madrid is that it does what all the great books do,” she says, “which is to foster the growth of the moral imagination.”
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