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.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThe contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
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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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By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.
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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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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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Bigotry doesn’t care about state or regional lines. It’s all over the place.
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One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility.
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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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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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I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.
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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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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 learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.
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That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.
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You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.
ADRIAN MATEJKA