Contemporary Authors

• The Devil's Garden Alice James (Farmington, ME), 2003
• Mixology Penguin (New York, NY), 2009
• The Big Smoke Penguin (New York, NY), 2013
• Map to the Stars Penguin (New York, NY), 2017

1. Map to the stars LCCN 2016041453 Type of material Book Personal name Matejka, Adrian, 1971- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Map to the stars / Adrian Matejka. Published/Produced New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2017] Description 114 pages ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780143130574 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3613.A825 A6 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The big smoke LCCN 2012045786 Type of material Book Personal name Matejka, Adrian, 1971- Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title The big smoke / Adrian Matejka. Published/Produced New York : Penguin Books, 2013. Description 109 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780143123729 Shelf Location FLS2013 020807 CALL NUMBER PS3613.A825 B54 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 3. Mixology LCCN 2009005805 Type of material Book Personal name Matejka, Adrian, 1971- Main title Mixology / Adrian Matejka. Published/Created New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books, 2009. Description xii, 80 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780143115830 0143115839 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0913/2009005805-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0913/2009005805-d.html CALL NUMBER PS3613.A825 M59 2009 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. The devil's garden LCCN 2003008133 Type of material Book Personal name Matejka, Adrian, 1971- Main title The devil's garden / Adrian Matejka. Published/Created Farmington, Me. : Alice James Books, c2003. Description 70 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 1882295412 Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cons041/2003008133.html Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip042/2003008133.html CALL NUMBER PS3613.A825 D48 2003 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Indiana University at Bloomington - https://english.indiana.edu/about/faculty/matejka-adrian.html

  Adrian Matejka

  Associate Professor, English
  acmatejk@indiana.edu(812) 855-1855Ballantine Hall 442Office Hours
  Education

  M.F.A., Southern Illinios University, Carbondale, 2001
  B.A., Indiana University, 1995
  About

  Adrian Matejka is the author of three collections of poetry: The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), Mixology (Penguin, 2009) which was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, and The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013). He is the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and fellowships from Cave Canem and the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and Poetry among other journals and anthologies. He is the co-director of the River Styx at the Tavern Reading Series in St. Louis.

• Barely South - http://barelysouthreview.digitalodu.com/all-issues/winter-2012/just-a-few-thoughts-away-from-poetry-an-interview-with-adrian-matejka/

  Just a Few Thoughts Away from Poetry: An Interview with Adrian Matejka
  by Emily Bonner

  I’m going to be honest here. After reading his book Mixology, I was afraid I was going to be intimidated meeting Adrian Matejka. I’m about as far from “the streets” as one can get and felt that someone as gritty and honest as Matejka could make me feel two feet tall. This, of course, is absolutely not the case. You couldn’t find a nicer guy than Matejka, or someone who is as passionate about poetry as he is about his subject matter. His current book, Mixology, is just that: a swirl of expression that utilizes conversational language and slang, creating a style that is all his own. Matejka’s love for music is front-and-center in his work, making his poems seem almost songlike themselves. This fall Old Dominion University was lucky enough to have Matejka read at the Literary Festival where he not only shared poems from his previous collections, but also read from a new working collection. The new collection, a book of poems written in the persona of boxer Jack Johnson, is going in a different direction than Mixology, but Matejka’s unmistakable style shines through as something totally unique to him. I was fortunate enough to talk him about his writing process and what goes on in this award-winning poet’s head when he’s crafting his own work.
  EB: To start off, who are some of your influences, past and present, and how did they inspire you to write the way that you do? How do your favorite poets/writers impact the way that you craft your own work?
  AM: That’s a great question. Sometimes I think I’m not much more than a collage of my influences. I owe so much to the artists whose work has inspired me. You know, there are the constant inspirations like my friends and family, Pablo Neruda, Portishead, and Richard Pryor. Then there are other, more deciduous influences that catalyze according to the project I’m working on.
  Mixology is a pastiche of inspirations ranging from Madvillain to Egon Schiele to Erza Pound, and the governing logic of the collection is that all of the influences can coexist in one text. Looking at the poems now, it sometimes seems as if they’re about to bust a zipper trying to contain the allusions. But at the time I was writing the poems, the allusions made sense and fit together organically.
  When I was writing the Jack Johnson monologues that ended up in The Big Smoke (Matejka’s forthcoming book, EB), I spent a lot of time with A. Van Jordan’s book, MacNolia, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Apocalyptic Swing, and Marilyn Nelson’s poem, “A Wreath for Emmett Till.” At the same time, I was studying photos and video of Johnson and listening to Arcade Fire, Sidney Bechet, and Thom Yorke’s “Cymbal Rush.” The connective tissue for these disparate influences became Johnson himself.
  Somehow, all of the texts—from Gaby’s powerful lyrics to Régine Chassagne’s voicing—worked into the fabric of Jack Johnson’s monologues. So rather than compartmentalizing, I try to find inspiration in whatever causes that “lump in the throat” Robert Frost talked about. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.
  EB: What is your writing process? Do you have to do anything that puts you in the mood to write or does it come spontaneously?
  AM: I don’t have much of a writing routine because I spend most of my time just a few thoughts away from poetry. I might be washing dishes or watching a basketball game, but I’m really thinking about poems. I write in bursts: images, melodies, motifs in notebooks, envelopes, on the back of a workout sheet at the gym. My desk is covered with scraps of paper and sticky notes with phrases or words that might become part of a poem later.
  Since I hover around the edges of poems like a kid at a middle school dance, the act of writing poems for me relies on improvisation in the moment. It’s like Yusef Komunyakaa said, “Getting down the urgent energy of the piece is improvisation, then comes the shaping and revising.”
  This method has served me well in the past, but there’s something about research-based poetry that required a fundamental shift in the writing strategy. Since there is history involved, the poems required a kind of cautiousness. You know, history and poetry have different agendas that don’t always coincide. I ended up researching Jack Johnson’s biography for about 2 years before I wrote a poem. I wanted to have some authority beyond poetic license to write in his voice.
  At first, it felt like the research diminished the spontaneity of the poems. But really, the research put spontaneity on layaway for a minute. I needed to address the historical and cultural absolutes around Johnson as a historical figure before I was able to get into the true moments of the poems.
  EB: You’ve lived in a lot of different locations, including California, Illinois, and overseas in Germany to name a few; how have these places affected your writing style or where you’ve taken your poetry? Is there one place in particular that has impacted your work the most?
  AM: I grew up in a military family, so I had the good fortune of living near Army bases all over Europe and the U.S. My mother told me I lived in Germany and in 10 states before the age of 7. That’s healthy, I’m sure. If anything, I think my nomadic lifestyle allowed me to de-emphasize geography in my work. Place becomes less important than the images or narrative driving the poem.
  I’m not sure that it’s a good thing to sidestep place in poetry. I’m envious of poets that have regional undertones in their work, where the geography works like an allusion of its own. “Southern” poets like my wife, Stacey Lynn Brown, or Rodney Jones, or Yusef Komunyakaa can write poems that exist in a space that both catalogues and interrogates geography. Or poets from Chicago like Carl Sandburg, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Patricia Smith, for whom place can be emblematic of some larger social or cultural understanding.
  For excellent poets like these, geography can be a real asset to a poem because it creates a key for how to understand the images and allusions in a poem. I mean, the image of a leafless tree in Mississippi is read completely differently in sense and substance from the same leafless tree in Chicago.
  The downplaying of place is part of the coping mechanisms most Army brats develop. Why get comfortable in a town or city when you know you’re going to leave in 6 months? So, lacking permanent geography, I consciously try to create a world for the poems to exist in outside of the physical, or one that is kind of generic and regionless.
  EB: In your book Mixology, there’s a definite tie between you and the hip-hop community; what is it about hip-hop that drew you to it in the first place? Is that where you developed an interest in poetry?
  AM: No question, rap music was and is a big influence on my sense of language. I’ve been listening to rap since the early 1980s. It was the first music that felt like it was mine. Back then, emcees rhymed about things I related to in a way I couldn’t relate to the musicians on the radio. In fact, when I was in 7th grade, my friend Ché and I formed a rap group: The 2 Furious MCs. At least that’s what we called ourselves in the living room where we worked on our rhymes after basketball practice. We didn’t get any further than the living room because we were pretty terrible. All heart and no talent.
  Rap music wasn’t the way I got into poetry, though. I discovered poetry through Langston Hughes, Etheridge Knight, and later, Yusef Komunyakaa. I saw Yusef read in a coffee shop when I was an undergraduate at Indiana University and was stunned by what he did with language. He was like an emcee—or maybe more appropriately, a jazz soloist. When I heard him read, I knew I wanted to write poems.
  It wasn’t until much later that I started exploring the direct connections between rap music and poetry. Mixology actually started as a response to De La Soul’s phenomenal album, The Grind Date. I stumbled on a track called “Verbal Clap” where Dave (Supa Dave West) says:
  See that gun powder rap’ll tip hats like gentlemen do
  smash tenements and skyscrapers
  bow-tie papers stacked high
  pay the resident tax or get your street sweeped
  There is something in the associative leaps Dave makes that reminds me of the moves good poems make. His lyrics also reinforce the reliance emcees have on metaphor, simile, and allusion. The thing is, emcees don’t use simile like poets. Poets generally adhere to a pattern of simile construction that involves the concrete juxtaposed with some other concrete, because most poets heed Pound’s warning about mixing the abstract with the concrete.
  Emcees don’t care about Pound. They step outside of his paradigm and use actions, allusion, other simile, abstraction—whatever they want to complete the motion of the simile. So I tried to imagine what kind of simile an emcee would use if he or she understood the conventions of poetry and wrote the poems accordingly. That’s where the linguistic strategy in Mixology came from.
  EB: There are a lot of young people just discovering the bridge between hip-hop and poetry, but still hesitant to try something that may seem too “academic”. What is your advice to young writers looking to mesh their love of music with poetry?
  AM: As a preventative measure, the first thing I would tell them is poetry and song lyrics aren’t the same thing at all. Song lyrics can be made better by using the tropes and strategies of poetry, but poetry doesn’t get anything but a bad rap from song lyrics. There’s a great book by the scholar Adam Bradley about rap music and poetry called Book of Rhymes that dissects rap lyrics using the conventions of poetry. He gets into the craft connections between poetry and rap lyrics incisively and shows how much poetic craft is involved in writing lyrics.
  As far as actual advice about meshing music and poetry: hear the beat, avoid the rhyme, and remember, as Ben Okri says, “We are born from stories.”
  EB: I know you’re putting together a new book featuring poems in the voice of Jack Johnson in the near future. Do you write in persona often? What sort of new world does writing in the voice of another open up for you?
  AM: Yes, The Big Smoke will be out in 2013. Honestly, I think all of my poems are in a kind of persona. I don’t have the confidence or linguistic swing to enunciate the way I’d like to, so to create a poem, I have to create a persona with the appropriate command of language and swagger to pull it off. It’s almost like a writing alter ego. That’s what I think “voice” is: a writer’s persona on the page.
  Approaching persona as the “speaker in a poem completely disconnected from the poet” is something that I didn’t do very often before The Big Smoke. I always wanted to, though. I’m a big fan of Tim Seibles’ persona poems. His persona poems like “Commercial Break: Road Runner Uneasy” and “Blade, Historical” are perfect examples of how a poet can create a portrait of a character through monologue.
  Ai, too. She set the standard for contemporary persona in her early books like Cruelty and Killing Floor. There’s a forcefulness and a need in her persona that seems to go beyond what a poet might be capable of in his or her own voice. She wears the mask the word “persona” connotes, whether it be the mask of a neglected housewife or a tenant farmer with authority and grace.
  What drew me to Jack Johnson initially was his inability to speak for himself historically. Partially because of his race and his accomplishments in the ring, Johnson was one of the most infamous figures of his time. The post-Reconstruction institutions—the newspapers and other media in particular—were in opposition to his success and did what they could to subvert him. In newspapers, Johnson’s speech was rendered in this busted vernacular – kind of like Buckwheat or something – that wasn’t true to the way the man actually spoke. His public image was crafted by racists and he couldn’t do anything to refute it.
  I saw writing these monologues as an opportunity for Johnson to tell his story in language that would be closer to the kind he would actually use. That’s what historic persona offers: the ability to synthesize voice and reclaim lost bits of language and culture. As those lost bits might be imagined, at least. I mean, no amount of research and creativity can revive everything that was stricken from the historic record. Too much has been erased.
  EB: Now that you have a grasp on what the new book is going to focus on, have you put any thought into what your next project might be?
  AM: Right now, I’m working on a project about astronomy. I’m not sure where it’s going to go because I just started writing the poems in May. I spent some time in Texas this summer and had the opportunity to visit the McDonald Observatory in Ft. Davis. While I was there, I saw Saturn through a telescope in real time. I could see the Cassini Divisions in the rings and the whole deal. It was humbling, to say the least.
  When I was a kid, I wanted to work for NASA when I grew up. My NASA dream got subverted fairly early by my mathematic ineptitude and I’d pretty much forgotten about it until I squinted through that telescope. Seeing that planet took me back to a summer when I scrounged cans to order a solar system model from the back of a comic. I sent the money, but I never got the model. That memory became the hinge for the first poem in the project.
  I’m not alone on this astronomy trip. There have been some really great collections “about” outer space recently—Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s ]Open Interval[ come to mind first. They are both fantastic poets and the poems reflect the kind of complexity necessary to tackle the cosmos in verse. It’s such a broad and malleable canvas and really, I think every poet is a failed astronomer in one way or another.

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianmatejka/

  Adrian Matejka
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  Associate Professor at Indiana University Bloomington
  Indiana University Bloomington Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
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  Adrian Matejka’s first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden, won the 2002 New York / New England Award from Alice James Books. His second collection, Mixology, was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin in 2009. Mixology was subsequently nominated for an NAACP Image Award. The Big Smoke focuses on the life of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson and was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and 2014 Pulitzer Prize. His newest book, Map to the Stars, was published in 2017. He is the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and United States Artists. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry, and Ploughshares among other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Indiana University Bloomington.

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  Indiana University Bloomington
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  Company NameIndiana University Bloomington
  Dates EmployedJul 2015 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs 4 mos
  LocationBloomington, Indiana
  Indiana University Bloomington
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  Company NameIndiana University Bloomington
  Dates EmployedAug 2012 – Present Employment Duration5 yrs 3 mos
  LocationBloomington, Indiana
  Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
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  Company NameSouthern Illinois University Edwardsville
  Dates Employed2007 – May 2012 Employment Duration5 yrs
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  Company NameSUNY Geneseo
  Dates EmployedAug 2002 – Jun 2003 Employment Duration11 mos
  Education
  Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
  Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
  Degree NameMFA Field Of StudyCreative Writing
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1998 – 2001
  Indiana University Bloomington
  Indiana University Bloomington
  Degree NameB.A. Field Of StudyEnglish / Psychology
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1990 – 1995
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• Adrian Matejka Home Page - http://adrianmatejka.com/about

  ABOUT ADRIAN
  Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University 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. Mixology was also a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. His most recent collection of poems, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His new book, Map to the Stars, was released from Penguin in March 2017. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, two grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Julia Peterkin Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and is currently working on a new collection of poems, Hearing Damage, and a graphic novel.

• Indianapolis Review - https://theindianapolisreview.com/featured-poet-adrian-matejka-a-few-words-about-his-new-indianapolis-inspired-book-map-to-the-stars-along-with-an-interview/

  FEATURED POET: ADRIAN MATEJKA
  By Natalie Solmer
  While brainstorming about a poet to feature in our first issue, it became clear Adrian Matejka was our first choice. Though he was born in Germany, raised in California and Indiana, he spent most of his formative years in Indianapolis. His fourth book of poetry, Map to the Stars, delves deep into the Indianapolis landscapes that reside within him. I was taken with this book’s layered and complex subject matter, and especially its haunting and accurate descriptions of our city, such as “like Indianapolis’s three skyscrapered / smile when the sun goes down & even // the colors themselves start talking,” from “Trumpets Up In Here -after Trumpet (1984) Jean-Michel Basquiat”.
  Map to the Stars follows the narrative arc of Matejka’s childhood and adolescence growing up on the Eastside of Indianapolis in the oft-referenced Carriage House East Apartments and on to his family’s eventual move to the suburbs in Pike township. Matejka explores drastic differences between these two racially segregated landscapes that include: intimacy with neighbors, assimilation, music, class, recreational activities, expectations, and the navigation of loneliness. No matter how disparate, the night sky is a uniting factor that runs through these environments. Matejka’s intense interest in outer space, the planets, and Star Trek informed his concept of belonging to a physical place.
  “I felt like I was from nowhere,” Matejka said, remarking that this book was the first time he explored in his poetry how geography and place have played a role in his life. Map to the Stars just came out a few months ago, and I was lucky to catch his reading at Indy Reads Books on May 25 of this year. He did not disappoint, and was very open and generous during the Q and A session. He talked about how “a lot of [the book] is about space and loneliness and the ways in which we deal with the world.” He then elaborated on how even though the suburbs exacted some positive influence over him, such as expectations and the metaphorical maps which helped him achieve his current success, the suburbs were like “another planet,” often a lonelier and less friendly planet. “I never liked bridges or cops & there / are more of both of them in the suburbs, / lording over possibilities,” Matejka writes in the poem, “If You’re Tired, Then Go Take a Nap,” whose title is a reference to the hip hop group EPMD’s song, “You Gots To Chill.”
  Matejka’s love and knowledge of music often shows up in his poems (the experimental jazz musician Sun Ra is a major presence in the book), and in deftness of sound within his lines. Matejka admitted during the Q and A that he wanted to be a rapper, but it didn’t work out because he didn’t have the requisite aggressive attitude. He mentioned how even in his poem writing, he is more subtle and circuitous, saying, “I imagined this book as a real aggressive addressing of income inequality, racism and police brutality, but that’s not the writer I am. . . I had to circle it and create small spaces to address it in.”
  At times subtle, at times more direct, Map to the Stars is a fascinating exploration of the psychic and physical presence of the city of Indianapolis and its impact on a native son. This book is just one of his many impressive collections which also includes The Big Smoke, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The highly accomplished and lauded poet teaches creative writing nearby at IU Bloomington. Matejka was kind enough to answer a few questions about his latest book and writing process for The Indianapolis Review:
  Yusef Komunyakaa has had a huge influence on your work. I remember hearing him talk about how we carry “internal landscapes” with us which come from the place or places we grew up in. I also read in your interview with Shari Wagner that you were surprised that you had so many Indianapolis poems inside you! When did you write the first Indianapolis poem for this book, and when and how did you realize you had a whole book of these?
  No doubt. Yusef was the first poet I ever saw give a reading and I was knocked out by his combination of rhythmic intention and lyric sophistication. I use these descriptors now, 25 years after, but at the time I didn’t know one kind of poem from another. I responded to the percussion of his words in a very fundamental way. I got to study with Yusef at Cave Canem later and he helped me to be a more capacious writer. He also helped me see what my first collection was supposed to be (as opposed to what I thought it was). I owe Yusef so much, both as a reader and a writer. I think he is extraordinary.
  But to your question, I don’t remember when I wrote the first Indianapolis poem from Map to the Stars. Maybe 2010? My original plan was to write about astronomy and the space program, so the appearance of so much terrestrial landscape was a surprise. Sometime in 2013 I realized I had a stack of poems that were orbiting and referencing Indy in various ways and that’s when the book began to take shape. That’s mainly how I work—in stacks and flourishes of sameness. I write a bunch of poems without thinking about direction. Revision is the part of the process that helps me see the poems’ shared obsessions whether they be space shuttles, Richard Pryor, or Lafayette Square.
  Your third book, The Big Smoke, about the life of legendary boxer Jack Johnson, is made up entirely of persona poems. You’ve said that it seemed a little crazy and daunting to write a whole book in this format. In your current book, Map to the Stars, you explore your formative experiences with race and place and how that affected your identity. That’s not an easy topic to write about either! Do you ever feel resistance within yourself when you are writing? What do you think of the notion that for poets to be successful, the poet must be ‘taking risks’ in their writing?
  Writing any kind of poetry is daunting for me, but it is a different kind of challenge to write historical persona. The imaginative action of examining someone life from inside—I mean, it’s their life and their experience, right?—asks that we subvert our perspective in service of someone else’s. Writers have to do a substantial amount of research to get it right, which is why these historical collections often end up taking a long time to complete. Projects like Camille Dungy’s Suck on the Marrow or Tyehimba Jess’s Olio or Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard or Frank X. Walker’s Buffalo Dance (and there are many other brilliant historical persona texts I could mention here…) require so much archival work to conceptualize and create. So there is the history the writer needs to learn and to contended with:all of the photos and documents and stories and myths swirling around the historical figure. Then there is the mode of persona itself, which expects that we give up most of our linguistic agency as writers and fully adopt a poetic mask.
  I’m a selfish writer mostly, so I resisted subverting my “voice” in service of a larger narrative at first. But the more I researched and wrote, the more I realized Jack Johnson’s (and Etta’s and Belle’s and Hattie’s) voices and narratives were vital and so much more interesting than my song and dance. The less I was directly involved, the more successful the poems were. Sometimes we do our best work after we acknowledge the scarcity of our own devices. Maybe that’s where the risk comes in. It’s risky (for some of us anyway) to acknowledge and be open to our own limitations. Writing poetry is in some ways about recognizing and trying to navigate emotional or intellectual aphasias. Articulating what we don’t fully understand can be a great risk while also offering some of the fullest possibilities for a reverberating dialogue.
  It’s obvious that music is an essential in your life and in your work. I’m going to ask you a sort of silly question that I ask all my students because the results (which are usually 50/50) really fascinate me! Do you write with music playing in the background or do you need silence to write?
  I don’t think it’s a silly question at all—it’s an important one to ask because it can offer some insight into the writing process and I love thinking about process. As in, are you a musical poet or an architectural poet? Do you find your way through rhythm or some other imaginative opportunity? I listen to music nonstop when I’m writing because I think about the sounds the words make as much as I think about what they may or may not mean. To keep my creative space open, I only listen to music that’s wordless and full of atmosphere—ambient, electronica, and jazz. Whether or not all of that external sound helps or harms the music in the poems is a different question maybe.
  Speaking of music (and poetry), can you share any favorite places or events you like to attend in the Indianapolis and/or Bloomington area for music? For poetry?
  I’m an old man now, so I don’t go out for live music as much as I used to. But I when I was in the streets, I went to the Chatterbox and Jazz Kitchen, both of which are still great venues for jazz in Indianapolis. I’ve also spent many nights at the Vogue, but that depends completely on who is coming through. I just finished writing an essay for Affidavit about seeing the great dub musician Lee “Scratch” Perry at the Vogue last summer. He was on tour in support of his transcendent album Super Ape. It was extraordinary to see an 80-year old man getting a room full of folks moving.
  I love the poems in Map to the Stars which draw on the influence of the artist Jean Michel Basquiat. How much of an influence does visual art have on your work? I hear you are now writing a graphic novel, so I would assume, a lot! Also, are there museums, galleries or events in our region that you recommend in regard to visual art?
  Visual art moves me more than any of the other creative disciplines except music. There’s something about the way visual imagery imprints–I can see the full version of the image or painting when I recall, not an emotional paraphrase or assessment. That immediacy lends itself to substantial conversations across the arts for me. But I think it’s fair to say that most writers and musicians respond to visual arts with a similar enthusiasm as visual artists (Basquiat especially) respond to music and literature. There’s admiration there in addition to inspiration.
  The Eskenazi Museum of Art in Bloomington is superb and has an extensive permanent collection in addition to visiting shows. The Eiteljorg Museum in Indy has a wide-ranging and truly overwhelming (in the good way) collection of art and Indigenous artifacts. But my favorite art space in the area is (and has always been) the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The grounds are gorgeous and the museum has featured some surprising and risky exhibits over the years. I saw an Egon Schiele exhibit there a while back that had people blushing from one painting to the next. They have a show coming up this fall about New York graffiti art that I’m really looking forward to as well.
  BONUS QUESTION- What are you reading right now?
  I just wrote something about this for the Poetry Foundation! I’ve got a stack of books I’m reading including the ones I listed in that post. But as of today my stack also includes Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment by wonderful poet/human/Indianapolis resident Alessandra Lynch. She’s such a gifted writer with a superlative ear and awareness of imagery. I’m excited to spend some of my summer with her new poems.
  SUPER BONUS QUESTION-How do you feel about revision? I know some poets who are very prolific and don’t revise much (work on a poem for a handful of sessions, and if it’s not working, they abandon it, it may turn up in a new poem from memory) and I know other poets who painstakingly revise individual poems for months and years. Which type of poet are you?
  It takes me about eight months to finish a poem because of my process: I write it, work to revise it for a while, then put the poem away for a month or two. Then I come back to it and revise it some more after the initial creative shine is gone. Yusef Komunyakaa wrote that, “Revision means to re-see, and, at times, it seems more accurate to say re-live.” The only way I can re-live something is to get some emotional and intellectual distance from it. Otherwise, I’m working from the poem’s contrails.

Map to the Stars
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Map to the Stars
Adrian IVIatejka. Penguin, $18 (128p)
ISBN 978-0-14-313057-4
In his stellar fourth collection, Matejka (The Big Smoke) evokes an Indianapolis boyhood in which economic and
educational privations starkly contrast with the inspiring expanses of outer space. Newly identified planets, space
shuttle launches, Star Trek, and Voyager probes encountered via radio, TV, and newspaper here become poignant
emblems of escape ("I bought the star map shirt for 15 [cent] at the Value Village/ next to the Piccadilly") or
hallucinatory imaginings ("the rusting coils under the top bunk/ curling like unexplored galaxies"). While such popular
figures as Prince, Richard Pryor, and Sun Ra make appearances, celebrities are dwarfed by the rich personalities of
neighborhood folks, such as the friend's mother who "tried to run her boyfriend over/ while he was stretched out near
half court." Matejka eschews philosophical rhetoric for a firm grounding in the organic rhythms of hiphop and trash
talk, offering surprising juxtapositions, as in "Emily Dickinson feat. Basketball & EPMD," where "the laces of my
suede// kicks come undone like the best-laid plans." Capturing the associative energy of the Internet age, he leaves
readers "bird-dogging the rhythms of the universe as you orbit/ the center of the skate floor like a B Side's stepson."
Matejka's witty tour de force achieves the rare feat of making a narrative centered in memory feel bracingly urgent and
fresh. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Map to the Stars." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928091&it=r&asid=569d368a6165c58957cd1496fb950090.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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The Big Smoke
Publishers Weekly.
260.49 (Dec. 2, 2013): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Big Smoke
Adrian Matejka. Penguin, $18 trade paper
(128p) ISBN 978-0-14-312372-9
The third book from Matejka (Mixology) covers the life of legendary heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, and like a
fighter in the ring, these poems are fierce and fast on their feet: "It's always better to whip than/to be whipped, so I took
the fight/straight to the bigger boy. Not long//after, fighting became a way/ to make money." This Jack Johnson, whose
channeled voice dominates the book, resembles the real-life boxer in his lovers, opponents, enthusiasm for opera, and
in the marks racism left on his life: "I always abide by the rules inside/of the ring. Those dock fights were/more about
survival than winning." The five sections here are woven with lyrics, letters, and , brief interviews. Strongest are the
shadow-boxing poems, titled alternately "Shadow-Boxing" and "The Shadow Knows," because they go far beyond
elaboration in verse to argue with the dominant narrative: "You're not fooling me/by quoting Shakespeare, Mr.
Champion of the Negro/World. No matter how/carefully you enunciate,/Tiny was a slave/& the condition of the
son/follows the condition/of the mother." Matejka's project straddles that risky line between life and art, and some
readers may question whether it transforms Johnson's life sufficiently into art, but others will find this to be a powerful
and accessible poetry collection. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Big Smoke." Publishers Weekly, 2 Dec. 2013, p. 60+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA353692282&it=r&asid=4103e3796afe0c6cc8f6d836546a239b.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A353692282
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The Devil's Garden
Gregory Pardlo
Black Issues Book Review.
6.3 (May-June 2004): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Cox, Matthews & Associates
Full Text:
The Devil's Garden by Adrian Matejka Alice James Books, October 2003 $13.95, ISBN 1-882-29541-2
In his first collection, Matejka challenges notions of propriety, as if breaking silence on long held family secrets. The
product of an interracial relationship, Matejka, in turn, makes miscegenation the organizing principle for many of his
poems. Part autobiography, part lyric abstraction, this collection gives voice to a multiracial, multiethnic experience that
reconciles a range of cultural values. Matejka's democratic project is an attempt to contain multitudes and the
contradictions the majority culture suggests they represent. The object is not so much to resolve competing impulses,
but to create a space where they can coexist.
Matejka exhibits a knack for synesthesia through gems of description flashing in a variety of contexts. A poem
regarding blindness calls forth a description of nutmeg as a "breath/ of too cold air." This lyric tendency leads to
uninhibited improvisations that are sometimes centered on a theme--color for example, or language itself, as in the
poem "Conjugating Opposites." Here, Matejka weaves phrases like "inter-stellar bric-a-brac," suggesting equally his
fascination with the material framework they present as much as the "anachronistic space" they contain. This is a smart
and engaging debut.--Gregory Pardlo
Gregory Pardlo is an associate editor of Painted Bride Quarterly.
Pardlo, Gregory
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pardlo, Gregory. "The Devil's Garden." Black Issues Book Review, May-June 2004, p. 50. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA116339496&it=r&asid=867cd3dfe3e0583645e6551c75b2ca41.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A116339496
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Matejka, Adrian. The Devil's Garden
Daniel L. Guillory
Library Journal.
128.16 (Oct. 1, 2003): p80.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Alice James. Oct. 2003. c.80p. ISBN 1-882295-41-2. pap. $13.95. POETRY
Using jazz and blues rhythms with telling allusions to Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Billie Holiday, Matejka
fashions a powerful autobiography in verse in this debut collection. Matejka's theme is the devilish perversity of a white
society that leaves him anguished to the point of crying in his "own vomit." He is victimized because of his biracial
background: by a white man with a shotgun, a Puerto Rican playmate with a lethal fist, and a man who wants to hang
him with a tope. He is further damaged by the acrimonious separation of his black father and white mother and by the
abortion of his own child, "a cataract/of misplaced blood." What redeems Matejka are visionary moments when a jazz
trumpeter becomes a "fist of glitter punched up/through the stage," or when common crows appear to "tap-dance
landscapes." Highly recommended for all larger collections.--Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Guillory, Daniel L.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Guillory, Daniel L. "Matejka, Adrian. The Devil's Garden." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2003, p. 80. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA108838461&it=r&asid=6c6a8ef3247f4ca5aaf8f491d680c260.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A108838461
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Adrian Matejka. Mixology
Stephen C. Behrendt
Prairie Schooner.
84.4 (Winter 2010): p160.
COPYRIGHT 2010 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
Full Text:
Adrian Matejka. Mixology. Penguin.
We all remember our old student editions of Pope and Dryden, in which a page containing as few as two or three lines
of verse would be filled with all manner of footnotes, usually long, erudite, and obscure. While John Dryden and
Alexander Pope assumed their privileged leisure-class contemporaries would understand all their clever references, we,
poor benighted moderns, were told that we needed this baggage of annotation in order to comprehend--and of course to
appreciate--what the poets had written. Pope and Dryden aren't the only examples, of course. Literary history is full of
them, and most of us have run afoul of them at one time or another. What many readers now think of as "old" poetry--
and especially the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--is often heavily allusive and intertextual; hence
the perceived need for annotations to guide the modern reader. It was just this sort of closed community of elite readers
that William Wordsworth famously blasted in 1798, in the little "Advertisement" that prefaced his and Samuel
Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads . Poetry, he argued, should speak plainly and directly, without any need for critical or
editorial "middle-men." Wordsworth was talking about the professional critical establishment that was emerging at the
time, but his comments are relevant to today's editors and anthologizers, who still annotate, annotate, annotate.
How badly do we need this sort of editorial gloss on today's poetry? Can we "get" the poetry without it, and if we
cannot, what does that tell us about the accessibility of that poetry--and about any author's assumptions about, and
expectations for, her or his readers? This is a particularly important question when it comes to Adrian Matejka's second
collection, Mixology . Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series, Mixology will be widely read and discussed--and
probably taught. And it is going to require of its readers an unusual degree of engagement, for it is not an "easy"
collection, for a variety of reasons. Not everyone will "like" Mixology . Readers are likely to be passionate on both
sides: the book leaves little middle ground. But this may not be a bad thing. Most artists would agree that the worst fate
that can befall their productions is audience indifference--a collective yawn and a moving-on to something that may do
a better job of getting a rise out of the reader.
In Mixology , the complex allusions are so many, and they involve so many areas and levels of contemporary culture
(and cultural practices), that much of the poetry may be--or may seem at first to be--obscure to an "average" literate
reader of poetry in 2011. To what degree is a poet permitted to require us to work hard in order to "get" the poetry,
then? Should we be required at all? Let's pose the question differently. Do we owe it to any artists to do our best to
learn their language and their "discourse map" as part of reading their works accurately and fairly? Underlying all these
questions is an assumption that is so fundamental it generally goes wholly unstated: any literary work (indeed probably
any work of art, regardless of medium) is both a "product" (or "production") and a sort of blueprint, or "training
manual," that educates its reader (audience) in how to "read" and evaluate that work. Every act of reading--like every
act of aesthetic perception, cognition, and assessment--is also simultaneously an act of learning and of "practice." It's
just that most of what we read does not make us so fully aware of this demanding operation, this brain-work, as
Mixology does.
Take the title. The "mixology" in Mixology refers to bartending and to the mixing of cocktails specifically. But it also
refers to contemporary recording studios and the electronic mixing of sound tracks to alter or otherwise manipulate
them. The Oxford English Dictionary also tells us that the suffix "-ology" means "the science or discipline of." So,
Matejka's "mixing" identifies both a subject and a methodology, a science. But there's more, for in the book the "mix"
provides a metaphor also for racial, ethnic, and cultural fractures and dissonances that the poetry everywhere sets about
exploring and perhaps reconciling--though any such reconciliation remains largely elusive at the book's end. No
wonder, then, that those who supply the collection's publicity blurbs ground their own comments within these
metaphors of mixing, one calling the book a "profound and powerful cocktail" and another the work of a "street-talking
surrealist" who mixes "good old-fashioned storytelling" with "the associative freedoms of music and collage." Some
years ago there was a great stir when Tiger Woods challenged the cultural mindset of the bureaucrats who expect people
to check a single box to identify their racial or ethnic heritage, as if it were all that simple. This kind of thinking
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bothered Woods, and it bothered the media (for other more self-serving reasons), and finally it bothered many among
the general public too. Mixology makes it clear that Matejka has lived with that bother all his life--it provides the
ground bass for the complex variations he works on the subject in these poems. And if they are likely to require
glossing and annotation (actually or only virtually) for many contemporary readers, these poems will surely require
such assistance for increasing numbers of readers later on, when the references and allusions grow still less clear, less
familiar. But that, too, may not be a bad thing in the long run.
Mixology mixes (no surprise) diverse and frequently contradictory elements of language, music, culture, race, and
anxiety in many ways, turning the subject of mixing over and over, much as a jazz musician mulls a theme in the
spiraling improvisations that he or she plays. While the musician can vary the performance from night to night, when it
finally gets recorded it gets "set down" much as a poem is set down in determinate form when it is printed. But, even
so, publishers still manipulate that text in many ways, "mixing" fonts, formats, graphics, paper, and cover art to produce
a finished book. Just so does the studio sound mixer manipulate the sound recordings to produce for the CD something
that is seldom "the same as" the live performance. So too do each of us mix the exotic cocktail of our own experiences
to arrive (or not arrive) at a self--both a private and a public persona--that is very much a "made" entity, a performance
that those around us have to regard as "real" or genuine, even when every party really knows better. Caught in the
inevitable duplicities that such a mode of existence imposes upon us all in our modern culture, how can we not
understand why the poems in Mixology , like the life and consciousness they illustrate, require us to know so much
while still reminding us that we cannot know everything--or even barely enough--to let us think that we are reading
with either knowledge or comprehension. Very existential, this, very postmodern.
Take a single brief poem:
"Samson and Delilah"
For Reverend Gary Davis (1896-1972)
Blind or saved, the end is the same:
guitar pick circling the reverb's foxhole
like the fingers attached
to the hand attached to the person
picking uneven bills from the collection
plate in the humidity of all things
sanctified and hungry.
Davis, the blind, gospel-singing Baptist preacher, was one of the giants--still insufficiently credited--of the blues guitar,
a powerful stride player equally at home with folk and ragtime fingering. Bob Weir (founding member of the Grateful
Dead) remembers Davis as the one who "taught me, by example, to completely throw out my preconceptions of what
can or can't be done on the guitar." This throwing out--or at least challenging and revising--of preconceptions is central
to Mixology 's project. The quotation marks that frame Matejka's title signal his allusion to Davis's famous blues tune of
that name, which the Grateful Dead (especially) subsequently popularized. But the "foxhole," of course, suggests war,
combat, soldiering, while the bills in the collection plate pick up Davis's ministry, their unevenness reflecting both their
differing denominations and their random arrangement in the plate. Meanwhile, the fourth line faintly but distinctively
suggests James Weldon Johnson's old anatomy-lesson song, derived from Ezekiel, about what's connected to what
among the "Dry Bones." This is precisely the texture of multiple reference that makes Matejka's poems something
special, a variety of poetry that, like a peony blossom, opens, petal by petal, layer by layer, to reveal ever more layers
within the flower head.
"Samson and Delilah" comes from Mixology 's second section, "Graveyard Attire," a set of homages to guitar greats.
Elsewhere, we find poems like the multisectioned "Texas Hold 'em with Gaudí Playing Cards," whose title jarringly
juxtaposes the most popular populist poker game played in casinos (and online) with a very up-market set of Art
Nouveau cards. If that's not dealing a sufficiently challenging hand, consider the first section of the poem "Five of
Spades":
Knowing he would be soup,
a tortoise flippers a wish
for salt water. He is squared
by spiraled pillar concrete
and sing-song concrete
with a real hatred for civil war
and tarragon. This is what happens
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when you can live half in
and half out of the drink.
The complex pun on "drink," the false equation of civil war and tarragon, the play on salt water and sculptured
porpoises--these are typical of the shifts and devices by which Matejka disturbs the reader's equilibrium, the reader's
expectations, through a calculated series of misdirections that itself images the countless false steps and blind alleys
from which the poet constructs and then "mixes" both the individual poems and the collection as a whole.
Even at the end there is not resolution but apparent impasse:
Half brother of the same halves,
simulacra
is fancy for "absent."
Like banging
means "good"
or off the chain
means "good."
The same way off the hook
forgets
the phone, I'm forgetting the space
between Oregon and North
Carolizzay, daylight savings time
and the addiction of the "-izzay."
We've got a disputed
lineage, like Arizona before
Estevanico named it. We've got all
kinds of folks acting like Estevanico,
get it? Mixed man, mixed man,
states weren't called states
, even though
the pedigreed mountains, the high-
styling lizards were already in place.
("Language Mixology")
And there it ends, Matejka's powerful, punning formulation--"mixed man"--ringing its variations in our ears, our
consciousnesses, as we work to sort out what the poet himself has only partially sorted, baffled and buffeted as he is
himself by all this conflict, all this mixing of the familiar and the foreign, what fits and what does not. Existential, then,
perhaps--but how very modern, how hyper-familiar.
Behrendt, Stephen C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Behrendt, Stephen C. "Adrian Matejka. Mixology." Prairie Schooner, vol. 84, no. 4, 2010, p. 160+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA244278956&it=r&asid=66fd24e615928e1923b2e1b4f1d0073f.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A244278956

"Map to the Stars." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928091&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. "The Big Smoke." Publishers Weekly, 2 Dec. 2013, p. 60+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA353692282&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Pardlo, Gregory. "The Devil's Garden." Black Issues Book Review, May-June 2004, p. 50. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA116339496&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Guillory, Daniel L. "Matejka, Adrian. The Devil's Garden." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2003, p. 80. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA108838461&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. Behrendt, Stephen C. "Adrian Matejka. Mixology." Prairie Schooner, vol. 84, no. 4, 2010, p. 160+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA244278956&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/02/why-i-chose-adrian-matejkas-map-to-the-stars-for-the-rumpus-poetry-book-club/
  Word count: 395

  WHY I CHOSE ADRIAN MATEJKA’S MAP TO THE STARS FOR MARCH POETRY BOOK CLUB
  BY BRIAN SPEARS
  February 17th, 2017

  It started, as it often does, with a recommendation from a friend, in this case Gabrielle Calvocoressi. She sent me an email saying “You have to look at this book.” I would have anyway, because I’ve been a fan of Adrian Matejka’s work for a long time, and in fact, I wanted his last book, The Big Smoke, for the Poetry Book Club but couldn’t make it happen.

  So I was excited when I got a PDF of Map to the Stars in my inbox, and was hooked from the first poem, “Star-Struck Blacks,” which evokes Indianapolis and the Midwestern winters I’ve recently become used to, but which ends with an allusion to a dick joke.

  Before I tell you more, a quick reminder that in order to receive your copy of Map to the Stars, read along with the Poetry Book Club, and participate in our exclusive chat with Adrian Matejka, you’ll need to to subscribe by February 20!

  Map to the Stars also spends a lot of time in space, or at least staring into it. Star Trek makes appearances in the Table of Contents, with poems titled “Final Frontier” and a series featuring Stardate designations, but so do Parliament and the Mothership, Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Voyager 2, and more.

  There are two main backdrops for these poems—life in Indianapolis, which is marked by hunger and the lights being turned off, and life in the suburbs marked by racism and white people who can’t get away fast or far enough. From “After the Stars”:

  ________________Upward
  mobility equals stars in every

  thing: the neighbors who moved
  ___out into even further orbits–
  Zionsville, Carmel, new fields

  & streets waiting for names.
  ___The neighbors who couldn’t move,
  stoic on porches like resilient

  pieces of a constellation. One
  ___black sky above them all.

  I’m incredibly excited to read this book more closely along with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, and to chat with Adrian Matejka at the end of the month. Hope that you’ll join in the conversation!

• Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
  https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/2017/10/review-adrian-matejkas-map-to-the-stars-is-an-extraordinary-ride/
  Word count: 450

  REVIEW: Adrian Matejka’s “Map To The Stars” Is An Extraordinary Ride
  By Voices From The Community | Published: October 6, 2017
  by Charles Ellenbogen

  Anisfield-Wolf award winner Adrian Matejka has produced another excellent book of poems. I chose the word ‘book’ deliberately. This is not a collection of poems, but it is, like The Big Smoke, a book. Generally, when I read poetry, I can read 2 or 3 poems at a time. If I read too many more, I can’t really give them the attention they deserve. This is not to say that Matejka’s poems don’t deserve careful attention; they do. It’s just that the book has such a narrative drive (see the transition between “Stardate 8705.29” and “Business as Usual” for an example) that I often had to remind myself to slow down.

  Together, “Map to the Stars” tells a compelling coming-of-age story that involves a move to the suburbs (which means a move from Prince to Fleetwood Mac) and all that involves, notably the sometimes unspoken but always simmering issue of race. In “After the Stars,” Matejka reports that “Upward / mobility equals stars in every // thing” and that the persona’s new neighborhood has “One sedan per driveway / & one tree centering each & every yard.” But all is not idyllic in the suburbs. Matejka reminds us that “All of this dirt came from some / other dirt repeating itself & you stand on top / of its frozen remains, arms raised like the Y / in YMCA. Look at you now. You are high-fiving / yourself in the middle of a future strip mall.”

  Throughout, “[t]he spacious myth of space” proves to be just that, a myth. There is a hope that “everyone looks the same / in a space suit” but they don’t. In “Outta Here Blacks,” Matejka notes that despite the move, some things didn’t change:

  We were outside our chalk-outlined / piece of town like a bad pitch. // We were outlying that old spot // like perfectly spelled / gentrifications.

  Still, there remains a somewhat empty hope for a fresh start. In the perfectly named “Record Keeper,” Matejka writes:

  & because nobody / hunts for dinner in the suburbs, we put down / our implements of half step & appetite, sidestep / the moon as it descends into a whole plateful / of charred thighs and wings. We collectivize / the back-in-the-days way as tenaciously as chicken / legs undress themselves at a cul-de-sac party, then raise the stripped bones to history. Out here, there / isn’t any, so history is whatever we want it to be.

  Charles Ellenbogen teaches English at Campus International High School in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.

• St. Louis Post Dispatch
  http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/reviews/memories-and-more-in-poetry-by-wrigley-mueller-jones-and/article_38c5518e-4ede-5478-b1ee-6ab50a65ccfb.html
  Word count: 376

  Memories and more in poetry by Wrigley, Mueller, Jones and Matejka
  By Lizzy Petersen Special to the Post-Dispatch Apr 22, 2017

  Poets with St. Louis-area ties are well-represented this National Poetry Month. These collections compile experiences difficult and unwieldy, illuminating deeply buried memories and revealing histories.

  [...]

  Adrian Matejka’s “Map of the Stars” merges distant galaxies: growing up poor and black in Indianapolis, moving from a rough neighborhood to the suburbs, Jean Basquiat and “Star Trek.” For Matejka, previously a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the judge who selected Mueller’s “State Park” for Elixir Press’ Poetry Prize, “Map of the Stars” marks his fourth poetry collection and continues his investigation of race in the private and public spheres.

  The poem “Post-Vietnam Blacks” starts: “There’s the upward mouth of space — // the honeyed smile of black / crowned by more black / front & center in our heads — // & Voyager2 winking like a gold incisor.” Matejka asks readers to arch their necks to take in the curved edges of space like an open mouth.The poem continues: “Then there’s the because / & I-told-you-so of it, // the absentee fatherism of it.” The line alludes to both God, the father of Jesus, and the stereotype of fathers in black communities. Seamlessly, Matejka sews these two worlds together such that they must have always been connected so intimately.

  The other hallmark of the collection is the series of poems after works by Basquiat, who was both a painter and a poet. “So Far to Go” is after “St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes” by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which depicts boxer Joe Louis, outlined in black sitting front and center with thinly outlined men behind him.

  By the end of the poem, Matejka has sainted “courtyard boys” into “minor superheros,” much like Basquiat’s sainting of Joe Louis. As in Matejka’s poetic biography of boxer Jack Johnson “The Big Smoke,” the poem complicates the heroism, ending “No saving / the block either because every swing breaks something.”

  This collection covers a lot of ground, and “Map of the Stars” covers an ever-expanding emotional landscape.

  Lizzy Petersen is the grants and outreach programs manager at River Styx.

• Journal
  http://thejournalmag.org/archives/9480
  Word count: 1431

  Review of Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke
  November 23, 2014 | REVIEW
  Adrian Matejka. The Big Smoke. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2013. 128pp. $18.00, paper.

  Adrian Matejka’s third poetry collection, The Big Smoke, dramatizes the physically grueling, racially charged, and ethically complex boxing career of the first African American world champion, Jack Johnson. With the exception of the closing poem, the voices of Johnson and his supporting players tell their own stories. For Johnson, that act of gaining sovereignty over the literary representation of his life substantiates his masculinity and his contested humanity. Early on, the reader will notice the subtle accumulation of the phrase “they said” in various forms. Johnson recognizes that his image, constructed by hands other than his own, fuels a corrupt campaign. That fabricated image corroborates a racist ideology that refuses to identify people of color as intellectually sound and morally upright individuals. If Johnson is indeed an inherently deviant beast, then the world can devalue his greatness as a boxer and negate his human status; it does not have to undertake the mentally strenuous mission of examining its belief systems.

  In the opening couplet of “Fisticuffs,” Johnson disputes claims of his moral and physical inferiority when he says, “Some reporters say I fight yellow, / but I don’t need to use the dirty tricks.” Johnson dismantles the common belief ingrained in the mind of Jim Crow America, which assumes that African Americans innately revert to their savage inclinations during moments of tragedy. Johnson destabilizes that prejudiced argument in “Cannibalism,” where he sets the record straight on the events that followed the Hurricane of 1900:

  …After the Great
  Storm hit, the Times called us “black
  ghouls,” cannibals eating coloreds
  & whites like Sunday chicken.
  They said we left babies in the street
  just so we could take a dead man’s
  shoes. They said we sawed off
  fingers at the fat meat for rings.
  I was there, so I know what’s true:
  whole families of coloreds shot
  down by whites. “Protecting the dead,”
  the sheriffs said, sending buckshot
  at any colored in sight. Those
  dead people didn’t need any more
  protection than the mud & rocks
  covering them.

  In this piece, the tension between Johnson and those theys widens and encompasses not only Johnson’s personal struggle, but a global struggle as well. In revising his own history, Johnson revises American history and amends the assumed and problematic image of the black American. It is easy for the reader to be seduced by the early poems, especially the first two. In these pieces, Johnson seems to be quite the activist. The lines “Coloreds were here before these / United States were even dreamed / of” sounds fitting for a civil rights speech. In “Battle Royal,” he explains how black men replaced animals in the age-old bear-baiting spectacle and calls out the men who arranged these events as well as their sadistic appetites for violence.

  …Once baiting

  was against the law, some smart
  somebody figured coloreds fight

  just as hard if hungry enough.

  Johnson not only calls attention to the inhumane audience who is pleasured by the grotesque destruction of the human body, but he also establishes himself as an educator who can trace the history of black people and their function within a country that consistently demonizes blackness. By initially highlighting Johnson’s ability to uncover the power and consequences of race, Matejka creates a stimulating reading experience that underscores the perplexities of the human condition. Just when you get comfortable with admiring Johnson, he tells you about Clara, his first love.

  Clara is the reason I don’t deal with

  Colored women anymore. I never had
  a colored girl that didn’t two-time me.

  Johnson is able to revise the insulting image of black males, but he is unable to do that corrective work for the black female. While he is aware of racism’s ability to situate whiteness as the pinnacle of beauty, goodness, and power, he still falls victim to racism’s influence. After Clara, he quietly, but swiftly, erases black women from his narrative. Once the collection begins to examine Johnson’s relationships with his other women, we find that his employment of misogyny extends beyond race. His views of Clara sound noble compared to how he feels about Belle, one of the many women whom he’s quick to reprimand with his fists as well as his tongue:

  Belle, I wouldn’t put
  my hand on you if you’d do

  what I say. If you’d just do
  what you’re told, I wouldn’t

  shake you that way.
  I wouldn’t raise a hand.

  Johnson’s relationship with Belle comes after he has secured a generous amount of fame, and he achieved that fame through violence. Up until now, Johnson’s only way to manipulate the world around him has been with his hands. The reader does not pardon Johnson’s actions, but she keeps Johnson’s unfortunate conditioning in mind while he recalls his turbulent relationship. She must also consider that Johnson’s upbringing leads him to believe that his abusive behavior is merely the result of a natural order.

  Belle, a woman is still
  a woman & the female mind

  is much slower than a man’s.
  You need reminding.

  You need direction.

  Matejka captures what is beautifully human about Johnson. Within one body, there exists a muscled courage, a spirit as vibrant as his Flyer’s engine, as well as a flawed value system and an unapologetic misogynistic attitude. This collection does not ask the reader to assign herself as an admirer or an opponent of Johnson. Instead, it asks her to conceive that a person is a gathering of contradictions. Johnson is eager to remind us about “the snappy left / that closed Kid’s / eye like a bank on // Saturday.” He arrogantly refers to the formidable Jim Jeffries as “The same man who retired immediately / after he saw me in action.” At the same time, he has no qualms with telling us about the epic whippings the Galveston dockworkers delivered. “[T]hose men gave me the kind / of beatings that made me want / to go back to the schoolhouse.” He employs that same wit and humbled nature when he narrates his meeting with Chrysanthemum Joe.

  …The man pursued me
  Like it was personal & I went down
  in the third thanks to a hard left to my eye.
  His fists were so fast I still looking
  for them.

  The only way Johnson validates his identity is through earning the heavyweight title, but Johnson can only attain his treasured championship title through the destruction of his body and at times, his soul. Perhaps the most stunning binary of the collection is Johnson’s Shadow. This sharp-tongued doppelganger is the righteous truth bearer locked away in Johnson’s conscience. When Johnson’s gold smile, expensive meals, and ever-growing supply of white women blind Johnson with a haze of luxury, Shadow reminds him that even exaggerated amounts of money cannot repair the unjust plight of black people.

  …No matter how
  carefully you enunciate,
  Tiny was a slave
  & the condition of the son
  follows the condition
  of the mother. Emancipation
  didn’t change a thing.
  Ask John L., ask Jeffries,
  ask Gentleman Jim or any
  of the other color-line-
  calling white fighters.
  Better yet, ask Tiny.
  Your ex-chattel mama
  will tell you all about
  the unconditionalness
  of blackness.

  After my initial reading of The Big Smoke, viewing Shadow as Johnson’s redeeming quality was tempting; however, uncovering how the two survive in the same skin simultaneously became a more attractive site of investigation. In fact, the entire collection begs for further analysis. Matejka portrays Johnson’s larger-than-life persona so honestly that experiencing these poems is no passive act. Rather, it is a psychological journey that warrants intense study.

  Ashley Warner is earning her M.A. in English and Creative Writing at the University of West Georgia. She has received scholarships to attend the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2014/01/the-big-smoke-by-adrian-matejka/
  Word count: 962

  THE BIG SMOKE BY ADRIAN MATEJKA
  REVIEWED BY WESTON CUTTER
  January 3rd, 2014

  I have something of an anxiety regarding project books of poetry, simply because the risks seem, somehow, even greater than the risk of just plain old poetry. Take something like Kiki Petrosino’s Fort Red Border, a book which anagrams Robert Redford’s name for its title and which features Redford himself as a character. That stunning book’s easy to bring up and say hey, not so bad, but the dangers of books like that seem huge, to whit: what if Petrosino hadn’t been successful in Fort Red Border? It wouldn’t merely have been that she’d written a crappy book; it’d’ve been not just bad but silly, somehow almost embarrassing (a dumb book of poetry centering around Robert Redford? Come on). I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels or thinks this way.

  I bring this up because when I first got The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka’s phenomenal third book, I was…nervous, I guess. Maybe intimidated. The book centers around Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion of boxing but, more than that, a larger-than-life figure—a man who married three white women and who was viewed as such a threat to society, white culture, boxing, America, etc. that, when he won his championship, the white establishment actually reached out, as if broadcasting some APB, for a Great White Hope (there’s a movie of the same name; it’s based on him).

  Thankfully (for me, for all of us), Matejka’s book is so wildly great that all concerns regarding possible project-level failures are moot (you may, for instance, have noticed that The Big Smoke is, as I write this, on the short list for the National Book Award). What makes the book great is, of course, sort of simple: the poetry is wonderful, at a word-level, at a work-level, all of it—this book’s one you can flip through and find lines like “Horses smell like what // it means to be fast : sweat & gravel / kicked up on early morning runs” (“Prize Fighter”) or “They call teeth dent in France, & the name / makes sense the way teeth do what they do / to bacon & shoulders & cakes.” (“Gold Smile”). But glorious lines are of course not enough (though I should be clear: Matejka’s lines are working-man-direct and unfussy, almost Philip-Levine-ish: there’s a deep music going on, and it’s more often [to nod toward THayes] muscular than anything else, emotional or logical, whatever) to sustain a book, and what Matejka’s invented to offer the book its oomph is The Shadow.

  Think of shadow boxing, that solo movements of a fighter imagining an opponent and choreographing his way through the necessary moves. Easy enough. What Matejka does, however, is double or triple or quadruple the notion of shadow by having—in each of the book’s four main sections (there’s a fifth section which consists of a single poem)—poems featuring Shadow. Here’s the first one in the book, “The Shadow Knows”:

  From day one, we aspire
  to more than the average

  Negro. None of that yassah,
  boss & watermelon rind

  smile for us. We want quail
  cooked in butter. We want

  gold where that gap tooth
  should be. Clarity for Negro

  caricature. We want high-
  styling clothing, gold rings

  on our fingers like Greek
  architecture, & gold pocket

  watches in our vest coats.
  More women than coats.

  White women in our architecture.
  We want peculiar & instinctive

  satisfactions. We want to be
  prize fighting’s main attraction:

  the Heavyweight Champion
  of the World. When we rise up,

  the whole Negro race rises up
  with us. When we get to the top

  it’s just us. No use for Negroes
  then, not even ourselves.

  One’d be hard pressed to nail precisely what voice this shadow is for Johnson (some internal voice of his, but also separate, or at least bifurcated [note the use of first person plural pronouns in talking about Johnson]), and yet the specifics almost hardly matter. The Shadow poems all share titles: there’s “Shadow Boxing” and “The Shadow Knows,” and three of the four sections have one of each. It gets confusing to try to articulate, but the significance of the poems can’t really be overstated: Johnson was a driven, hunted, haunted man, and Matejka imagines a way into the man’s whirling, jockeying hungers through the Shadow poems that makes the entire book come crackling alive.

  Not, for the record, that it wasn’t already alive: from the first poem to the last Johnson’s story is given poetic flesh. Here’s the first lines from the first poem [“Battle Royal”] from the first section [Hurt Business] “Back then, they’d chain a bear / in the middle of the bear garden // & let the dogs loose.” That scrappiness, the danger of the scene, the need to fight your way out: the whole book’s cascading with just such beauty and energy. The Big Smoke is just like the best art: something you hadn’t even realized how desperately you needed till you got it. Get it.

  Weston Cutter is from Minnesota and is the author of All Black Everything and You'd Be a Stranger, Too. He's an assistant professor at the University of St Francis and runs the book review website Corduroy Books. More from this author →

• St. Louis Post-Dispatch
  http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/reviews/mixology/article_39724979-4479-53a1-a45c-e92661939fa9.html
  Word count: 343

  'Mixology'
  aaron belz May 31, 2009 (0)
  The poems in "Mixology," Adrian Matejka's second book, cut quickly from image to image and phrase to phrase, all the while serving up pop references. "A fishbowl full of dub," ends the first poem, and its reference to music remixes is an apt description of the collection as a whole. From mix to remix, sample to skit, the collection reads like poetry, but it riffs like hip-hop.

  While stylish, it's also aware of history. "Mixology" mingles DJ Jazzy Jeff, Q-Tip and Flava Flav with Jorge Luis Borges, Wassily Kandinsky and Cormac McCarthy in the long shadow of Thomas Jefferson, whom the poet calls "the original enabler."

  Matters of race and identity, figured against the ever-shifting backdrop of media culture, are of central importance to Matejka, an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. A Cave Canem fellow (an honor for upcoming African-American poets), Matejka is the son of an African-American father and a white mother. Light-skinned, he could be mistaken for Latino or Italian.

  The poem "Do the Right Thing" recounts an unfortunate interaction between Matejka and filmmaker Spike Lee. Matejka asks Lee to sign a T-shirt when "he edited me like one / of his characters: Why you care? / You ain't even black." The experience leaves a "missed / free throw feeling in my chest."

  Powerful and exact, this image is like many others in the book: seemingly tossed off, almost disposable, but chillingly accurate.

  Reading "Mixology" is a dizzy ride, but if you can keep your bearings, you'll find more than just scenery to admire. The music alone will keep you grooving:

  "Great afro, huge hands, guitarus: / mountains here and there stretched from hardwood / and devil's dust," begins "Landscaped Postcard as Jimi Hendrix."

  And you'll find a young professor who's found his rhythm in time to win the National Poetry Series — a big accomplishment by any measure.

  Aaron Belz's second book of poems, "Lovely, Raspberry," is forthcoming from Persea.

• Black Coffee Poet
  https://blackcoffeepoet.com/2012/02/20/mixology/
  Word count: 789

  MIXOLOGY
  Posted on February 20, 2012 by Black Coffee Poet
  Mixology

  By Adrian Matejka

  Reviewed by Jorge Antonio Vallejos

  I remember hearing the compliment of compliments in terms of writing a couple of years ago. It was about Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. A writer (whose name I can’t remember) at the International Festival of the Authors in Toronto said of Pamuk, “I don’t need to go to Turkey, Orhan Pamuk has already taken me there.”

  As a traveler I would dispute that statement.

  As a writer I was impressed, and I quickly looked into who this writer of writers, Orhan Pamuk, was.

  Good writing takes you places. Adrian Matejka, author of Mixology, winner of the National Poetry Series 2008 (USA), takes you into his life as a mixed-race man.

  As a mixed-race person myself, I felt at home.

  Do The Right Thing, a poem about Matejka meeting famed Black director Spike Lee, is a punch in the gut. If you know film the name attracts you. If you know of Spike Lee, you know he’s intense.

  In Do The Right Thing (the poem) Lee does nothing but wrong!

  After a dispute over merchandise at a Black Expo—Matejka challenging Lee over a “Free South Africa” t-shirt—the famed director barks:

  Why you care? You ain’t even black.

  An expo goer follows by saying, Damn Spike, that ain’t right.

  Matejka ends by describing his ill feelings at that moment as “the missed free throw feeling in my chest.”

  You’re never enough as a mixed-race person. One group says you look more like this, another group says you sound more like that, all groups bounce your identity around like a pinball in a never-ending game.

  As a person who on many occasions has not been Arab enough, South American enough, Indigenous enough, Chinese enough, Matejka had me freeze like pressing pause on a Michael Jordan highlight. Book in hand, lungs in my throat, eyes glued to Lee’s words, Matejka took me to the Black Expo and back to memories of being surrounded by ‘my peoples’ in different settings—those “you ain’t even” settings.

  Matejka’s clever word-play in the choice of his title couldn’t have been done better. The poet starts with Lee being surrounded by fans; he includes the title of the poem as the title of the film, “Fresh off seeing Do The Right Thing”; he shows his strength via challenging an icon; and he shows the weakness in Lee’s attempt to uphold status via tearing down Matejka’s identity.

  Do The Right Thing is a brave poem, and bravery is often needed when doing what’s right. Two lines too long of being a sonnet, Matejka’s song of pain is felt every time I read it. The first time my eyes absorbed Matejka’s words I was KO’d by a punch I didn’t see. Now, as I read Matejka’s poem over and over (countless times in the two years I’ve owned Mixology), every couplet is a jab leading to the final blow that lays me flat.

  Race, as is mentioned above, is central to Mixology. Powerful lines throughout the book leave you thinking about Matejka, race in America, and the life of a mixed race person:

  1. marrying white, creating a child of stuttered pigmentation from disco and chalk

  2. Being of color in Texas is to wake stressed from being.

  3. Bad to be black, worse to be a mixed indetermination.

  4. In Texas, cornrows are landscaping.

  5. Mulatto Shakedown: your daddy was a black man and your momma was white

  Wow!

  Each line can be the subject for an essay.

  Each line represents past, present, and future.

  Each line is a sad truth.

  Matejka mixes music (Blues, Hip Hop, Rock and Roll), politics, race, and identity. Mixology is a cocktail that is bitter sweet; a song you replay even though it brings tears to your eyes; a book you want to tear up but can’t put down.

  Mixed-race or not, Matejka, like Pamuk, takes you into his world and shows you what it’s like; the first line of the book describes what you’ll experience when reading Mixology:

  Today, I’m assimilating like margarine into hotcakes.

  Tune into Black Coffee Poet Wednesday February 22, 2012 for an inclusive interview with Adrian Matejka.

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