The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThat was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
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It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.
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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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It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.
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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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I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.
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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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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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But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.
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I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
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They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
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By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.
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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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The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.
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