One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem. By that … - Adrian Matejka

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To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: It is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral.

Adrian Matejka

One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem. By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself. I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that. So to try to truly render the kind of economic and racial inequity I grew up in, 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.

Black, Fun, Kid, Mean, Nothing, Writing

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I visited the Museum of Modern Art last spring and spent time with David Alfaro Siqueiros's painting, 'Echo of a Scream (1937). ' I got spun out by the way he creates tension and movement through the interlocking details in the painting. This poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros's compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.

Art, Museum, Neighborhood, Process, Spring, Style

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. I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable. I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him. 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.

Band, Bones, Boys, Character, Kids, Worked

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems. The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated. 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. 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.

Course, People, Show, Struggle, Struggling, Writing

Bigotry doesn't care about state or regional lines. It's all over the place. But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it's about perception and balance sometimes I think.

Balance, Bigotry, Excellent, Human, Perception, Thinking

The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again. It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I'm terrible at writing overtly political poems.

Air, Kid, Kids, Political, Trump, Writing