An Interview With Former USA National Poetry Series Winner Adrian Matejka [Culturelicious]
By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), Mixology (Penguin USA, 2009), and The Big Smoke (Penguin USA, forthcoming in 2013).
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry among other journals and anthologies. You can find him at www.adrianmatejka.com or on Twitter.
BCP: Why poetry?
AM: I first tried to write poetry in a lame attempt to impress a girl, but my appreciation for language came before that. I wanted to be an emcee when I was younger. Fortunately, for everyone, I figured out pretty quickly that I couldn’t spit rhymes and moved on to the next thing.
A few years after I gave up the mic, I discovered some poets who value sound and percussiveness the same way emcees do. First, Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight. Then later, Gil Scott-Heron and Yusef Komunyakaa. Through these incredible poets, it became clear that poetry is an art that allows both music and communication. Once I figured that out, I never wanted to do anything else.
BCP: What is your process?
AM: I don’t really have a process because the way I approach the page changes with the project I’m working. Many of the poems in Mixology began as individual images or moments that made me laugh that I went back and mixed together. Like a collage artist or maybe like a DJ.
My new book, The Big Smoke, is all historical persona about the boxer Jack Johnson. That imagistic approach to writing wouldn’t work, so I changed my process to fit the material. I spent a long time researching Johnson’s life and times before I sat down to write a poem. And when I did finally begin writing, the poems came out as continuous monologues.
BCP: Who, or what, are your influences?
AM: My primary influences are my friends, many of whom are poets. Ruth Ellen Kocher, Allison Hedge Coke, Sean Singer, Sherwin Bitsui, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Major Jackson, Kevin Neireiter, Terrance Hayes, Gaby Calvocoressi, my wife Stacey Lynn Brown—my influence roll call could go on for a very long time. I experience their work and am inspired to write harder, to think more aggressively about language.
Then, of course, there’s always music. I’m always listening to music. It saturates the poems through the cadences and word choice. In fact, I just finished up a series of poems that are simultaneously about astronomy and jazz. Even when I was thinking about outer space, Miles Davis’s trumpet was playing in the background.
BCP: How long were you working on the poems featured in Mixology?
AM: Most of the poems in Mixology were written between 2004-2006. I had just quit my job editing a literary journal in Texas and made the choice to step away from poetry for a while. When I did come back to poems, I stayed in the lab grinding without really thinking about what might come out of it. I just wanted to write the kind of poems I would want to read. Because of that, it took a while to get the work out into the world. In 2007, two literary journals—Crab Orchard Review and Pleiades—ran some of the poems and it was on after that.
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