Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Adrian Matejka
Poet Adrian Matejka on how music lives in the body before it lives in language, what bullets and boyhood have in common, and why a poem that doesn't swing isn't much of a poem.
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To write a poem without those sounds in my head would be to write a memo or to write an email or something.”
To write a poem without those sounds in my head would be to write a memo or to write an email or something.
Music is not ornament for Matejka but the structural condition that separates poetry from functional prose.
In context
the way that I had navigated the world. I always have music playing when I'm writing, usually jazz or some kind of electronic or with very little language. And so to write a poem without those sounds in my head would be to write a memo or to write an email or something. And so they naturally filter in, I think. Sometimes in the language, sometimes in the line breaks, sometimes in the sort of
Receipt
There are two kinds of people: those who walk through the world with a running monologue in their heads, and those who have music playing — and it's how we carry ourselves that lets us navigate the unexpected.
A therapist's diagnosis frames Matejka's entire relationship to music and language as innate rather than chosen.
In context
did all of these tests and at the end of it she said you know there are two kinds of people in the world there's just two kinds either those who walk through the world with a running monologue in their heads or those who have music playing in their heads and it's the way that we carry ourselves that allows us to navigate all of the unexpected things that happen you talk yourself through
people in the world there's just There are two kinds either of people: those who walk through the world with a running monologue in their heads, or and those who have music playing in their heads — and it's the way that how we carry ourselves that allows lets us to navigate all of the unexpected.
Receipt
The bullet is a grim onomatopoeia for itself.
The line turns the bullet's sonic violence back on itself, making sound complicit in the weapon's meaning.
In context
made in America each year. Enough bullets to kill all the earth each year. The bullet hits three times faster than we can hear its concussion. The bullet breaks the air with 2 ,182 mile -an -hour admissions. The bullet is a grim onomatopoeia for itself. The bullet is a slim allegory for a gun -happy nation and its attendant segregations. Lead belly, wrapped into the grinning freedom amendment, a gun is almost
Receipt
Most boys fight so much because we can't tell anybody.
Boyhood silence is named as the root cause of physical fighting, shifting the poem's violence into emotional suppression.
In context
light of weekday pews snakes are baptist guilt minus legs empty baptism rivers are snakes empty dance floors are snakes most snakes are guilty because we need to blame somebody most boys fight so much because we can't tell anybody somebody somebody is a snake in a human hat some human in a red hat snakes his way past the abandoned garden while asking all the wrong questions snakes didn't ask for any of this
Receipt
If one center of gravity in a poem is the music, the other one has to be the heart — like binary stars, these two things have to exist at the same time.
Matejka articulates his poetics as a gravitational balance, where neither music nor feeling can exist without the other.
In context
you do is you use your body to express your emotions, not your language. And for poets, I mean, it maybe can be both. But if this one center of gravity in a poem is the music, the other one has to be the heart, right? Like, these two things have to exist at the same time as, like, sort of binary stars. This brings me back to the thought about
If one center of gravity in a poem is the music, the other one has to be the heart right? — like binary stars, these two things have to exist at the same time. as, like, sort of binary stars.
Receipt
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