I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThey are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
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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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By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.
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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 mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.
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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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Bigotry doesn’t care about state or regional lines. It’s all over the place.
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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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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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I was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.
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Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.
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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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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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There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.
ADRIAN MATEJKA