It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.
ADRIAN MATEJKAIt will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThey are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThe contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.
ADRIAN MATEJKABut fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it’s about perception and balance sometimes I think.
ADRIAN MATEJKAI was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.
ADRIAN MATEJKAOne of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.
ADRIAN MATEJKABy that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThere is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.
ADRIAN MATEJKABones 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 MATEJKAI wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.
ADRIAN MATEJKAI was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.
ADRIAN MATEJKAThe day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.
ADRIAN MATEJKABecause before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.
ADRIAN MATEJKAI was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.
ADRIAN MATEJKAI 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 MATEJKAEcho 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