Adrian Matejka Archives - The Behaviour University

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

Perception

Thinking

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I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad… I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing. But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.

Mean

Past

Thinking

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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

Spring

Style

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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. 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.

Character

Emotional

Kids

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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. There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back. They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

Circumstances

Enough

Home

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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.

Fun

Mean

Writing

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One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility. I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Emotional

Possibility

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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.

People

Struggle

Writing

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The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount. Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever. I was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.

Black

Insecurity

Thinking

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Quotes by Adrian Matejka

Adrian Matejka

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.

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad… I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing. But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.

I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years. There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back. They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility. I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount. Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever. I was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.

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