I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.
ADRIAN MATEJKAI was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.
More Adrian Matejka Quotes
-
-
It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
Echo of a Scream (1937).’ I got spun out by the way he creates tension and movement through the interlocking details in the painting.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
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.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
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 MATEJKA -
But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it’s about perception and balance sometimes I think.
ADRIAN MATEJKA -
It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.
ADRIAN MATEJKA