I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThis poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros’s compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
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But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it’s about perception and balance sometimes I think.
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One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.
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I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
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It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.
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The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.
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Echo of a Scream (1937).’ I got spun out by the way he creates tension and movement through the interlocking details in the painting.
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I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.
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It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.
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They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
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But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.
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So while I loved not being hungry and having new gear, etc. I missed the sounds of my neighbors and the kind of generosity people who are struggling together often show.
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I was always casting about for role models as a kid and the Star Trek was always available via reruns and also full of possibilities.
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There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.
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I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.
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I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn’t fun to write, even though the poems aren’t 100% autobiographical.
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One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility.
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You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.
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Bigotry doesn’t care about state or regional lines. It’s all over the place.
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I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.
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It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.
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The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.
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By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.
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That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.
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The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.
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I was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.
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I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.
ADRIAN MATEJKA