It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.
ADRIAN MATEJKABecause before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
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I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.
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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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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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One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.
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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.
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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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That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.
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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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The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.
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Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.
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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 wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
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There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.
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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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