I was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.
ADRIAN MATEJKAI wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
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One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.
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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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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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But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.
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Bigotry doesn’t care about state or regional lines. It’s all over the place.
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You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.
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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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I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.
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They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
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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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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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It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.
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This poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros’s compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.
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There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.
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I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.
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The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.
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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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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 wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
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Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things
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I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.
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The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.
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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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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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It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.
ADRIAN MATEJKA