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.
ADRIAN MATEJKAOne of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
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The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.
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You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.
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I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
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It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.
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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 Spock because he was unflappable.
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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 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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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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By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.
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It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.
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The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.
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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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They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
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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 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 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 learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.
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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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I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.
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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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Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.
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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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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
ADRIAN MATEJKA