Adrian Matejka – Conversation & Three Poems

for the series, The American Wing
curated by Carlie Hoffman and Tiffany Troy

Carlie Hoffman & Tiffany Troy: You’ve mentioned before that, in addition to poets like William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hayden, and Yusef Komunyakaa, to whom you return frequently, you are also inspired by musicians. Would you say that a strong inspiration for your voice as a writer is the sound of language, which is as important as its formal possibilities?

Adrian Matejka: I used to be a radio DJ, so musicians are an entirely different thing. Short answer: Miles Davis, Fela Kuti, Portishead, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, and Charles Mingus. If the artists on this list (both the poets and the musicians) have anything in common, it’s that they changed the way people regard artistic possibility. Maybe possibility is the thing that I’m most inspired by, regardless of the art form in which it manifests. 

Rap was the original linguistic inspiration for me. I wanted so badly to move through the world with the bravado and clarity rappers seemed to have in the 1980s. I think about the language retrospectively, but seventh-grade me was more inspired by the postures of Public Enemy than their words. I didn’t understand then that when I got hyped hearing “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” a small part of me was responding to the Bomb Squad’s beats, while my brain was responding to the lyrics. Like these: 

I got a letter from the government the other day
I opened and read it, it said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me givin’ a damn, I said, “Never”

I think that quatrain (and what comes after) shows the post-Vietnam politics in the United States and the racism of the Reagan era so clearly. Public Enemy’s lead rapper Chuck D famously said that rap music was CNN for Black people, a way to get the word out around the gatekeepers. But to get back to the question, I was a terrible emcee front to back, even though the sonic truth-telling of some of my favorite emcees in the 80s led me to poetry. 

CH & TT: In your view, what can poetry offer people today? What personal meaning does poetry hold for you?

AM: Poetry offers a different kind of opportunity for readers than it does for writers, so I’m going to focus on the writers. To bring Chuck D back for a minute, Black people have been historically disenfranchised, silenced, and often erased in the United States, and the coopting of jazz, blues, and differently, rap, has been catalogued at length. What we don’t talk about as much is the early moments in jazz or rap when it was still a pure cultural expression. Early on, rap offered a voice for voiceless Black and brown youth. That’s what poetry is for me. Poetry continues to be a conduit or voice for young people who feel unseen or unheard. It’s one of the rare arts that empowers even as it catalogues and testifies. Poetry offers writers of all ages a space where their voice can join the long chorus of verse, even if they are singing a different tune. 

CH & TT: Is there a poem or poetry collection you believe everyone should read at least once—and why?

AM: Everyone should read the great Indianapolis poet Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up.” If it didn’t have so much PG13 language in it, I would share some of it here. It’s a poem that shows not only the power of poetry but the possibility of poetry. For those of us who grew up being force-fed T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost in English class, finding Etheridge Knight’s poem and the poems of his mentor, Gwendolyn Brooks, showed so much more possibility in language and in the line. This isn’t to shortchange Eliot or Frost; it’s simply to suggest that for me, transformation comes from the brain, the ear, and the heart, and “Feeling Fucked Up” was the first poem that hit me all three places using language from my day to day. 

CH & TT: What guidance would you give someone reading poetry for the first time?

AM: My main advice for any first-time poetry reader is to leave whatever expectations you have about poetry on the side of the road and read Lucille Clifton. Check out “Won’t You Celebrate with Me,” “Homage to my Hips,” or “Cruelty.” Each poem is immaculate in its craft, rhetoric, and insight. Many of the best poems work rhetorically like Ms. Lucille’s poems do; they just are about different subjects, grounded in different cultures, and operate in different vocabulary systems. Once you understand the underlying shape of a poem, the rest is easier to navigate.  

CH & TT: What are your hopes for the future of American poetry and its place in our culture?

I’ve been waiting for a poetry takeover for about 25 years as attention spans have gotten shorter and written language has gotten diluted by audio and video. It’s got everything people look for in 2026: it’s mostly short, relatively compressed in its language, and it’s portable. It’s sharable by text, email, or social media, so the medium in which it can appear is flexible. There is a poem out there somewhere for every occasion imaginable as well. So I’m still holding out hope that people will come back to poetry as poetry. Not as song lyrics or as an adjective for other art forms, but as the original human art, the one that is meant to always sound good while offering our hearts and brains even more. 

Three Poems

by Adrian Matejka

ORDINARY AS IT GETS 

In every Midwest amusement park,  
there’s the music of the mind & then 
there’s the music of the maw—
tonsils out, ticking up The Beast’s 
wooden-slatted hill: rocking set list 
curated for all the popcorn-getters & thrill 
seekers above & below. Do high schoolers 
still drive to Cincinnati for Senior trips? 
The music is raucous as you ascend: 
Living Colour, Guns N’ Roses, the coaster’s 
clacks & creaks as the loudmouth PA 
relentlessly reminds the entire contraption 
was built from leftover wood. Back on Earth: 
human-sized Tasmanian Devils, big sodas 
in every hand, rigged ring tosses & a spectacular 
boardwalk next to a teacup ride spinning 
crying toddlers. Their protestations soundtracked
my first kiss next to a first aid station. You
could use some tongue, the girl said, grabbing 
the collar of my church camp t-shirt 
as the coaster dashed above. Then she was gone, 
swallowed by a pack of friends, high fives 
all around because she won the dare. Me, 
left light-headed by the circusness of it—
sleight-of-hand, weight-guessing shenanigans 
everywhere. Later, I tried to sneak onto 
the couples-only ride alone. The two-toothed 
carney taking tickets snatched me by my neck. 
He said I was too lightweight to ride solo
& back then, he was probably right. 

ANOTHER CARNIVAL 

I broke north with no delay 
the day the cops caught me 
peeing in my neighbor’s 

mailbox, the one to the left 
with Jeff the mutt who never
stop yipping—always 

barking loudest the night 
before a test. Cops never 
came to our neighborhood, 

so why then? Fly down,  
me looking up, trying to chart
constellations as red & blues 

flashed & stars slunk away. 
Then I was out like shout 
as they say in the “Scenario” 

remix. Zipping up on the run, 
middle-aged cops in pursuit, 
arms in L shapes just like 

former high school runners 
who remember the postures but 
must have forgotten all 

their last place finishes 
as I cut through the next 
neighbor’s yard & split 

chain link, straight into 
the dank salvation 
of the farmer’s field. 

On the other side: a pop-up 
carnival in my school’s 
lot, portable Ferris wheel 

wobbling above corn tops 
as bumper cars bullied 
each other down low 

& the red-faced clown 
in the dunk tank yelled 
the usual epithets at every 

Black person walking by. 
That wet clown gave me 
a damp double take from 

his seat up top as I sprinted 
by, but couldn’t figure out 
what to yell so I would stop. 

BE EASY

Around sundown, the four lilies 
holding it down in the front yard 
stay open, like the window 
of a passing car on a warm day. 
They smell like somebody else’s 
floral brightness, fragrant treats 
unwrapped on a blossomed plate 
only the fancy grandmas put out to eat. 
Easy is all I’ve wanted since 
I was a kid, cramped in summertime 
Section 8: flowers everywhere, 
my bird-legged brother a couple 
steps back, my sister book-nosed 
somewhere in the radius of us. 
Just a deciduous minute for us.  
No more backtalks, no more slapbacks. 
Be easy, my uncle would say 
when I wouldn’t stop running 
in circles. Be easy, he’d say 
on his way out. Just an easy inhale 
I imitated before tiptoeing 
through the door while everybody 
else snoozed. Unlatch, run away,
join the closest circus. Escape, 
like bats do wheeling up top
in sonorous, clicking cauldrons.
I ran under them & to the stop, 
past those long-necked lilies, exploded 
in self-congratulatory colors. 
Their purples are easy as June, 
their reds like the woman’s attitude 
waiting as the empty bus scooted 
past without picking either of us up. 

About the Author:

Adrian Matejka is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), which won the New York / New England Award, and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His following collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel, Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century, was published in February 2023 by Liveright. He currently lives in Chicago and is Editor of Poetry magazine.
https://www.adrianmatejka.com/