Transcription by Daryl Chen

[music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan]

Pádraig Ó Tuama: Hi friends, Pádraig Ó Tuama here. Thanks very much for listening to Poetry Unbound. In between Poetry Unbound seasons — and we have Season 11 that’ll start later in 2026 — we have a whole host of interviews that I’ve done with poets over the last two years. Poetry Unbound in Conversation, we call them. 

I’ve loved the opportunity to talk to poets about their craft, how they see the world through the lens of poetry, and what this art form does for them. These Poetry Unbound in Conversation episodes deepened my curiosity about language and art; I trust they will for you, too.

In this episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation, you’ll be hearing from Adrian Matejka. Adrian is the author of many books of poetry, including most recently Be Easy: New and Selected Poems, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2026. He also serves as the editor of Poetry magazine. In this conversation, we discuss how a bilingual upbringing, improvisation, DJing, and a lockdown spent listening to David Bowie influenced Adrian’s poems.

Our discussion also ventures into patriarchal violence, international conflict, and the subject of autobiography. This conversation was recorded in September of 2024 at the Wick Poetry Center in Kent, Ohio, in honor of the center’s 40th anniversary. Deepest thanks to David Hassler and all the staff, volunteers, and attendees of the Wick Poetry Center for making this conversation such a delight.

Welcome to Poetry Unbound in Conversation. My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and here I am with Adrian Matejka. 

Pádraig Ó Tuama: So, good afternoon, everybody. 

[applause]

Ó Tuama: It’s so nice to see you all. Thanks very much to the Wick Center and to David Hassler and to Maggie Anderson and all the good people involved in all the work involved in this. My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, as David was saying, and I’m thrilled to introduce Adrian Matejka, who was born in Germany, part of a military family, grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is in the country of America.

And he is the author of many books: The Devil’s Garden, Mixology, The Big Smoke, Map to the Stars, Somebody Else Sold the World. His first graphic novel, Last on His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century, was published last year. There’s lots of awards and fellowships. You can ask him all about those awards and fellowships — he’ll be delighted to tell you — and he was poet laureate of the state of Indiana from 2018 to 2019. He lives in Chicago and is editor of Poetry magazine. So please give Adrian Matejka a warm welcome to Kent, Ohio.

[applause]

Ó Tuama: I’m going to start off by quoting you back to yourself, Adrian, which I’m sure you’ll love. Here, in a poem called “Love Notes”: “Meanwhile, Miles Davis is Miles Davis in each and every city of protest, three-fingering I told you so’s in his smirky dialect of halves and wholes.” Beautiful. Could you talk to us about music? Music is everywhere in your work. 

Adrian Matejka: Thank you, Pádraig. It’s good to see you, man, and thank you all for being here. Can I start with something about the poem and then talk about the music? I think that there are enough of us in here of a particular age that would remember those notes you would write in class when you liked somebody, and it’s like, “Hey, do you like me? Check this box.” You know? Right? 

I remembered an instance in which one of those notes was being passed. I had written it, passed it across the classroom, and the teacher grabbed it, and got up and was like, “What is this?” And then she read the po … it was all in all caps because that’s all I could do. I hadn’t learned cursive yet. And she read this note that I’d written in all-caps voice and was just like, “Do you like me? Check this box. Yes. No.” Right? Everybody’s laughing at me. The kid who was supposed to be passing it immediately pointed at me so that she knew whose it was. He’s like a total snitch in fourth grade already, you know?

And when during COVID, when I was trying to figure out how to write a love poem, I thought, “Well, you know, what if I revisited that idea,” you know, extracted the teacher and that embarrassment. But what does that look like in a poem? What does ‘Do you like me? Check this box” look like?’” And sometimes it looks like Miles Davis playing Miles Davis kind of things.

Ó Tuama: Talk about music as well. 

Matejka: Yeah. So I was a DJ. I was a radio DJ. I was a, you know, DJ at parties and things like that. And so music has always been a part of the way that I 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 the predicaments of the poems. But either way, there’s always music, and I hope that doesn’t make anybody feel any kind of way.

But for me, if a poem doesn’t swing, it’s really not much of a poem. And so I think about the great Indianapolis poet, Etheridge Knight, and he had this haiku that said, “Making jazz swing in seventeen syllables ain’t no square poet’s job.” 

[laughter]

Matejka: So that’s sort of my mantra. When I was poet laureate, I didn’t have any contact information on my business card. I just had that haiku. And so I would just give that to people …

Ó Tuama: That’s great. 

Matejka: … who felt like they might need it. 

Ó Tuama: Could you read another of the “Love Notes” poems, the one on page 15? 

Matejka: Yeah, sure. So you all have to forgive me because I didn’t bring my readers, and so I have to kind of lean into the light when I read in spaces like this.

[starts to reads poem and then stops]

Matejka: But you know what? I’m going to read it off my phone instead. I was just joking yesterday about this, that I had seen Phil Metres read from his phone, and he was so cool at it, and I thought, “You know, maybe I should start doing that to save myself instead of bringing out my glasses.” But then I just actually forgot them. So that’s the truth of it. I turned …There. Oh, let me see if I can … Oh, let me see. Oh, that is amazing. Thank you. 

[laughter]

Matejka: Just came through. What’s your name? 

Unknown speaker: Jen. 

Matejka: Jen, thank you so much for saving me. That’s a poetry community right there. Yeah. Thank you. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah I know. There’s a metaphor for you.

Matejka: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So watch me read this on purpose this time. 

[reads “Love Notes”] 

Matejka: Thank you again, Jen. Appreciate that. 

[applause] 

Ó Tuama: There’s a lot of ways within which music shows up in your work through direct references, but your poetry is musical in and of itself, just even some of those words there: “you”, “news”, “crooning”, “tattoos”, “moon”, “confessional”, “processional”. And also the way that you use alliteration and assonance. You know, there’s formal rhyme, there’s vowels that echo each other, there’s consonants that echo each other. What does that do for you? I mean, you mentioned already that, you know, there needs to be some kind of movement within the music of a poem, but take us deeper into it. Unfold it a bit more. 

Matejka: Yeah. I think that for me, the poem comes from a body place. And when I’m writing, I can feel myself. When I’m reading, I can feel myself starting to move, and some of those things, like assonance, emulate movements to me. Consonance, especially alliteration, feels like a part of a kind of dance, you know? And I might be the only person. It might be in the, you know, the imaginary discotheque in my head, but that dance is happening as I’m reading the poem and thinking about it. And then when I sort of reenact it, when I reread it, I can feel those parts of my body moving again.

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: I should also say I write everything by hand, and then I write it by hand again and again before I get into the computer where there is no dance with the computer, right? 

Ó Tuama: No. And when you’re reading it, are you usually sitting down? Or do you move around when you’re kind of working on something? 

Matejka: I stand up …

Ó Tuama: Okay.

Matejka: … a lot of the time when I write. Like, it’s not a standing desk situation. It’s a me at the kitchen counter writing on it or someplace else on a bookshelf. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: Because I need to have my whole self. Even before I was struggling to read my, like, my, the print in my book, which should be large print, I realize now.

[laughter]

Matejka: You know, before I was struggling to do that, I was struggling to sit here and to not want to stand up and enact the whole thing. Maybe that’s some of the leftovers from being a performer. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: Some of the leftovers from getting chastised all the time when I played French horn and not having the proper posture so that you can, you know, engage your embouchure.

Ó Tuama: Mmm. I wonder if you could read “Hearing Damage” on page 11 with those magnificent readers. 

Matejka: They look so much cooler than mine do. If you saw mine, you’d be like, “Oh my God. Steal hers.” Yeah. So it’s on page 11, you said? 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: I’m telling you, I feel a lot cooler than I usually do. Okay. 

[reads “Hearing Damage”] 

Ó Tuama: This poem feels to me like a musical autobiography. You can clap for them all. Yeah, yeah. 

Matejka:  Thank you. Yeah, I mean, it is in some ways. If I was John Cusack, you know, I was really taken by Say Anything when I was a kid, and that’s not even an actual reenactment of it, but that those moments of, like, early loss, those moments of early heartbreak, I think they’re … my first versions of those were in movies, more than they were in my personal life. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: I had the same girlfriend from sixth grade to college. 

Ó Tuama: Wow. 

Matejka: So I didn’t have that stuff that other people had, where they had those really disruptive breakups in, like, eighth grade or, you know, sophomore year or something. It was the same person. 

Ó Tuama: That’s a love note that really did its work when she checked the little yes box. 

Matejka: I would love to think that that was, it was that. But I think it’s that I lived in Indiana, and I looked enough like Prince to get by.

[laughter]

Matejka: I think that was it. If I’m going to be honest. 

Ó Tuama: Okay. One of the things that’s so interesting about that, and this brings us back to what you were talking about with music and the body. You know, there’s the trumpet and then the boom box, but then there’s palpitations. So there’s the way within which rhythm and music is the body. It isn’t just external to us, that somehow we are music, and we’re corresponding to it. Wonder if you could talk about music as a way of being in the world, not just as a pastime or entertainment. 

Matejka: Yeah. So, originally, when I wrote that poem, it was syncopations instead of palpitations. 

Ó Tuama: Ah. 

Matejka: And I went back, and I was like, “Well, you know, that’s not even it. It’s not syncopating at all.” No. It’s, you know, having this sort of moment of stutter as you’re moving through the world when you see something or have something happen to you, you know? And if we are, as poets, supposed to move through the world with a poet-like ear or a poet-like heart, then music has to be central to that. 

For some months, I had just music playing in my head all the time. It’s always there, but usually it’s like sort of turned down. And for a while it was turned all the way up, and I would be in meetings and I would have like, you know, Wayne Shorter “Speak No Evil” really loudly in my head. And I’m trying to explain to people what they need to do for the next issue or something, and this music is just so loud.

And so I was like, “All right, there’s something going on.” Like it’s the way I love music has transformed itself in a way that’s not helpful anymore. So I went and talked to this psychiatrist, and she was like, “All right, are you sure that you’re not doing any drugs?” And it’s like, you know? I was like, “I mean, not on any of the… except for the usual ones.” You know? She’s like, “Are you sure these things aren’t happening?” And she had this list. We 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 it, or the music carries you through it. And so I’m just one of those soundtrack people, and my soundtrack got left on too long. I was not able to write anything during that time.

Ó Tuama: Wow. 

Matejka: Because I’d sit down and all I could hear was the music, not my reaction to it or what it evoked in me or anything like that. And so as much as I love, like this, the musicality of things and to lean into that, that was an instance where my deep immersion for the last, I mean my entire life, the deep immersion in music came back and, you know, I guess was probably saving me for something that I still don’t understand. But at the same time was incredibly distracting and disruptive.

Ó Tuama: Yeah, yeah. Huh. 

Matejka: Yeah. So think about that for your all, for yourselves. Like are you talking to yourself right now, or is there music playing and it sounds like I’m talking over the music? 

Ó Tuama: Somebody Else Sold the World is an engagement with David Bowie and many other musicians as well — Future, Miles Davis, lots of others. I wonder if you could say a bit about the David Bowie reference in terms of the title. 

Matejka: Oh, yeah, yeah. So this book started out as a book of love poems. I wanted … I’m really bad at writing them, and so I was trying to figure out a way to challenge myself a bit and try to figure out a different mode of operating in because I fall in love all the time, like the perfect pear, you know? Or a piece of music or a piece of art. Like, and I just sit there and I’m just engrossed with this for weeks at a time. I mean, not the pear, I eat it, and it’s gone. But like some of the other things, right? 

And so during COVID, when it first happened, and I’m almost ashamed to admit that I didn’t think it was going to be that deep. We would have, you know, maybe a week at home, and then we’d be back out. So I got really lucky. I was supposed to do a reading someplace that I wasn’t excited about going to because it involved one of the small planes, like the propeller planes, and I don’t like them. And so I got out of that, and then I was going to … I had a week, I imagined, to be at home. And so my partner and I just … I got my DJ set back out. I got the turntables back out. I started spinning music. We would have brunch every morning, like tater tots and like pizza in the afternoon. 

Like it was like just a party for a week, and then we realized, Oh, wait a minute, no, this is going to keep going. And it’s going to keep going, and it’s still going, right? And so in that time, one of the things I came back to was Bowie and his version of “The Man Who Sold the World”, which then Nirvana did an amazing remake of that brought it back for a particular demographic, right? It came on, and at some point it just stuck.

In the same way I was talking about things getting caught in my head and carrying it, there… I heard it, and there’s something else there, and I knew there was something about the song that was about the moment that we were dealing with too. And so for those of you that don’t know the song, it’s based on a poem by, called “Antigonish” by a guy named Hughes Mearns. And in the poem, Hughes is walking down the steps in a castle or the protagonist of his poem is walking down the steps in a castle and encounters an apparition, so it’s a scary poem. In David Bowie’s song, the pop-commodified version of David Bowie is walking down the stairs, or the real David Bowie is walking down the stairs and runs into the commodified version of David Bowie and doesn’t like at all what he sees.

So that’s what that song is about, is somebody walking into the version of themselves who sold out the world, right? At that point, we had a president, and we had many members of our … of the U.S. government who had sold all of us out in this kind of way. Oh, you know, it’s not the federal government’s job to deal with this; it’s the state government. And the state’s like, “Oh, no, it’s not us, it’s the local government.” And nobody wanted to step in, so there was just us trying to figure out how to survive in this moment, right? 

And some people were really beautiful in that moment. Like, some people became their best selves taking care of their neighbors and family members. And other people were, you know, fighting over ketchup and toilet paper. And so, like, there’s a kind of thing that was happening around us, where I felt like we’d genuinely been sold out in a particular way. So that’s the really long answer to that but by about the third week of COVID, of me listening to this song every day multiple times, my partner was like, “Absolutely not. I never want to hear that song again.” You know, it’s like, “Headphones, dude, all the time if you want to listen to that song.” So for like eight more months, I had headphones on listening to that song trying to figure out how to write these poems. 

Ó Tuama: Lots of the themes about what you just spoke about are picked up in one of the poems, which is called the same as the book, “Somebody Else Sold The World” on page 37 if you’d read it for us.

Matejka: Yeah, it’s still banned at the house. It’s too bad. Okay. 

[reads “Somebody Else Sold the World”] 

[applause] 

Matejka: Can I read one other of those? 

Ó Tuama: Oh, yeah. 

Matejka: Is that okay? 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: And so there’s another one of the Somebody Else Sold the World poems that I wanted to share with you pretty quickly that has a reference to Wimpy from Popeye, you know, who would always like say, “Oh, we’ll pay you back Tuesday if you give him a hamburger today,” because that felt like something the president would say.

And then it also has a reference to the consummate middle-aged whiner Prufrock is in here. And so anyway, I wouldn’t … Is that okay if I read that? 

[reads poem] Somebody Else Sold the World. I don’t know if I should, excuses. It’s a really good deal, excuses. It’s not mine even if I could, excuses. If I don’t do it, someone else would, excuses.

If I don’t play along, I’ll be, excuses. I’m committed to it now, see, excuses. Oh, no, not me, excuses. Excuse me, I’ll get you back next Tuesday. Let us go you and I, excuses. Excuse me because I loved you too much. Excuse me because I swerved too much. Well, what had happened after it was, excuses. Well, I planned to catch a bus after it, excuses.

It was dark, and he was dark. Recuse me. There’s no one to help me, excuses. I was worried about my safety, excuses. What about me? excuses. Excuse me, what about me? 

[applause] 

Ó Tuama: Your book is arranged in … this particular book is arranged in different sections, one of which is called “Different Violences”. And there is a kind of a scientific-level, detailed study about the parts of a bullet in it, and I’m going to get you to read a few of them. But one of the things I noticed when doing some research about you is that when you have written about historical characters, you want any piece of information you put into it to be factual. And you hold yourself to that kind of constrained form within that. You don’t want to just be musing or introducing things that aren’t factual into characters that you write about, and I wondered if that influenced the way you wrote about a bullet as well in terms of research. 

Matejka: Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. When I was working on The Big Smoke, dealing with people’s lived lives, I wanted to make sure that I honored that work. I mean, it was hard, right? You know, I mean, Jack Johnson’s life was hard. The women that he engaged with had hard lives. The people around them, I mean, it was difficult at the turn of the century, and I didn’t want to shortchange that by thinking that my imaginary would be more significant than the way … the things that they attended to while they were here on the planet, you know?

And I think it does carry over because I don’t want to be wrong. Like poems can’t be right or wrong, but if you posit a poem as being based in fact, if you change that fact, then the poem is wrong, right? And so there are five parts to a bullet. Like, I didn’t, you know, want to only do three. I wanted to make sure that I was able to attend to all of them. I did a bunch of research about the components that build these machines. And yeah, I wanted to reimagine what those parts could be. I wrote the first section of the poem in response to the Parkland shootings and read it for this reading in Tampa. It was AWP. It was called Bullets Over Bells.

And so that was the beginning of it. I just thought it was going to be one poem, like just one single thing. But then I came back to it and I was like, Wait a minute, there are all these other parts that we could maybe consider metaphorically, but also just as how we take them for granted. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: I was watching this show called “Gangs of London” last night, and there are so many bullet casings and so many bullets flying around, and we’re used to seeing those things. If you watch a procedural, you, they, you know, good criminals know to pick up the shell casing, right? We, l shouldn’t know any of this. I’ve never touched a gun. But I know them from it being so immersed in part of our culture. So imagine being a 12-year-old who is in need of mental care with access to weapons, and you already know all these things because you’ve been watching them. It’s a incredible and combustible confluence of things. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. I wonder if you could read a few of those poems from that sequence. I was thinking of the ones on page 23, 25, and 27, but you can read whichever ones you wish. 

Matejka:  Yeah. No, that’s good. Let’s see. Jen, I really like looking through these colors.

They’re am … it’s amazing. I need to, I’m going to get rid of my black rims and get something else now. Okay. You said 23? Yeah. All right. So this is the, actually the first section of it. It’s bullet parts. It’s the primer, which is brass and lead, and that’s like sort of the base that we are familiar with — the little circular base.

[reads “Primer (Brass + Lead)”]

Matejka:  I stumbled there for a second because I rewrite my poems and I’ve changed some of the stuff in my reading copy. So to see it as it’s actually written, I was like, “Oh, that’s … I remember that.

This one’s called “Propellant”, and the propellant is either gunpowder or cordite.

[reads “Propellant (Gunpowder or Cordite”)]  

Matejka: And then maybe this last one, bullet, and it’s, the bullet is actually lead and alloy. 

[reads “Bullet (Lead + Alloy)”] 

[applause]

Ó Tuama: Thank you. As you said, the bullet is the thing in and of itself that you’re focusing attention on its component parts, as well as you’re using the metaphor of that to take us. I’m struck in the first one that you read, bullet parts, you know, classroom, music, pens, education. There’s such a reference in that, it seems to my imagination as I hear it, about bullets and schools.

Matejka: Yeah, there’s definitely that connection, which was not a thing that many of us had to deal with as young people. But my kid came up in the era of school shooter training, like active shooter training, and somebody made the point not that long ago that the kids who are now doing that did the training too, so they know where to look, right?

And that is a terrifying thing to think about. But there’s also the metaphor, I think, or at least I’d hoped might come clean is that the way that we invest in the military versus the way we invest in the other things we’re talking about. You know, the cost of like one fighter jet is enough to sustain the school system in certain cities.

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: Right? And so to imagine that we are, maybe not us, but you know, some of our neighbors and elected officials are making the choice to, instead of investing in humans, they’re investing in violence, right? And we are so good at this. Like, humans are so good at coming up at way, with ways to hurt each other. And so to take something that was imagined to be a medicine and turn it into such a potent device for destruction is very human. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: You know? 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, said that a metaphor expresses what language represses or what society represses. And what are some of the other things that by focusing on the actual fact of a bullet as well as bullet as metaphor, what else do you think is repressed in society that you’re trying to give voice to through these?

Matejka:  Yeah. Yeah. You know, we were talking about this a little bit earlier because I love metaphor. I love similes, both for their sounds but also for their opportunities. And I’m going to try to ex, say this really quickly because it could be kind of a muddy explanation. But there’s a post-colonial theorist named Homi Bhabha, and he had this idea that if you have two different communities with disparate cultures and identities, and you try to get them to communicate, they can’t do it because if you, you know, you speak English and someone else speaks French, you’re stuck.

You can’t … There’s nothing you can do. So in order to survive, you have to create a third space, and that’s what he calls it: a “Third Space” communication. You have to find a third space in which to engage. And for me, like, the … a metaphor is the third space, right? 

I have one idea of how these things operate. Somebody else has another idea, and they are generally in the same wheelhouse. But to make that plain, it requires a metaphor or a simile sometimes. You can’t just go directly and say, “Well, this is what I think. Bullets are bad.” Because somebody else thinks that they’re … maybe they’re not. And so how do I get them to see the framework through which I’m making my assessment and why I imagine this to be, without them saying, “Well, bullets don’t kill people. People do.” Like that kind of, you know, sort of circular logic. I’m like, “Well, that’s great, but in our third space, we’re going to talk about this in a different way from either of us dealing with it.” This is a metaphor, and hopefully you can see, you know, through the metaphor what I’m not able to express … 

Ó Tuama: Yeah.

Matejka: … in any linear way if that makes sense. 

Ó Tuama: I’d like to stay with some other metaphors and similes. You spoke in one of the other Someone Else Sold The World poems you speak about “Like it’s 1982 again when the power got cut off and the neighbors brawled like sullen countries over the demarcation of kitchen table and china hutch.” “Brawled like sullen countries” — it’s funny but knowing, some of the other concerns that you’ve got, you’re bringing war or the threat of war in the humor of this piece of simile as well. 

Matejka: Yeah. So I’m sorry to be so autobiographical today, but when I grew up in Section 8 housing, and so before we moved out to the suburbs, we lived in a pretty rough neighborhood. And the neighbor to the side where my, the headboard of my bed was a drug dealer, and he and his girlfriend would fight all the time, and they’d be throwing each other up against the wall where my headboard was, and I could hear them fighting and like, you know, arguing about who was going to take what when they left, and they would never leave. They just stayed and fought all the time. And so my memories of certain times in like third grade and fourth grade were of getting woke up when the wall would start shaking, and that should be terrifying, but it wasn’t because it reminded me that I wasn’t by myself in this really weird way. And so that’s when I started thinking about countries like people as their own geography and the things that we might expect from those spaces. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. Hmm. When you moved back to the States from having been in Germany for a long time, you spoke German. I know that you’ve got some French and Spanish as well. Has that contributed to your interest in using language in a particular way when you write in English? 

Matejka: You know, it’s funny because I … So I spoke German. It was the first language I spoke. My mother was a translator for the U.N., and so she — we just spoke German in the house when I was a kid so that I would have this other language. But when we came back to the U.S., you know, I showed up in Los Angeles looking like, I mean, like a young version of what I look like now with this big Afro but with a German accent. And we lived in this neighborhood that was predominantly Mexican, and these kids were like, “What are you?” And so, you know, and the habit … I mean, kids are so cruel. Like, the habit of kids, like, they would beat me up on the way to school every day. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. 

Matejka: Right? Yeah. But about a month or two of that, and all of a sudden, like, I dropped all this, like this German accent was gone. And then they moved on to another thing to torment me because that’s what kids do. But I just refused to speak it and eventually lost it. I tried to take some classes in high school. Didn’t work. I listened to some German rap music, which was terrible, and that didn’t help either. Didn’t help. I know. It was so bad though. I think that maybe Germans just don’t need to really mess with music in the same way that maybe the French do or Italians do. There’s something about the language that’s like the percussion section when music requires, you know, somebody to play a melody. 

Ó Tuama: Yeah. I want to, as we go into the last section of conversation, I’m going to stay away from your opinions about Germany. 

Matejka: There’s a bunch of Germans are like, “All right.”

Ó Tuama: Yeah. That’s my background in diplomacy coming through. 

Matejka: They’re going to be waiting for me afterward. Yeah. If my mom was here, she’d make you lunch.

[laughter]

Ó Tuama: You have an interest in masculinities — plural. Men show up in different ways in your book and not just in one way in one poem either. There’s a whole variety of representation of masculinities. I wonder if you’d read “Snakes Because We Say So”. It’s page 53. And then we can talk about some of those things.

I will say, while you’re looking for it, Adrian has this brilliant reference to a cat: “As the cat bumbles another jump and keeps trying in the custom of dudes.” Where that was one of the ways within which this reference to masculinities, you know, somebody who’s bumbling something and keeps trying. Just “In the custom of dudes”. 

Matejka:  Yeah, he just keeps going.  So I have a daughter who’s 9 … she’s 18. She’s about to turn 19. She just started college a couple weeks ago. It’s wild to think about that, right? Because that makes her the, maybe the fourth person in my family to go to college, so this is a really big deal.

But I wrote this for her, and she had this boyfriend, or this guy she had a crush on. So I wrote this poem to, you know, give her some pointers or whatever. And all of that is, like, I think is okay. It’s a poem. She’s fine. The thing about it that wasn’t okay, and I realized it was a really bad dad moment, she was at a reading with me and I thought it would be really funny to read it. And she didn’t know it was coming, had never heard the poem, and I read it. And the boy’s name is Jake. That was the boy that she liked. 

[reads “Snakes Because We Say So”]

[applause] 

Matejka: Thank you, but my daughter would disagree. 

[laughter]

Matejka: She was like … she was so mad. I mean, after she got finished being embarrassed. And the thing was that Jake was just, like, this corny little theater kid with his socks pulled up and, like, Birkenstocks and great manners. And I was like, “No way. You stay away from my daughter.”

[laughter]

Matejka: What did I know? 

Ó Tuama: I mean, it, there’s the poem in that of, you know, the protective parent who is kind of trying to educate through poetry their daughter in the ways of the world. But then, like it, it changes. You know, it’s not just a poem like that. “Most snakes are guilty because we need to blame somebody. Most boys fight so much because we can’t tell anybody.” There’s lament in that and calling something out. I wonder if you could speak about those two lines especially. 

Matejka: Yeah. I mean, I think so. I had … I’m so autobi … These poems aren’t even autobiographical, but the metaphoric moves, I think, come from those spaces. My biological father was in Vietnam. He did four tours, came back absolutely out of his head and a heroin addict. And so there wasn’t someone around me to be an example for what you were supposed to do. My example was this, and that’s not an example at all, right? So what ended up happening was, like, the older kids in my neighborhood were like, “Here, this is what you do. This is how you act to girls. This is what …” 

And all of it was toxic. But they didn’t know either because they’d been given the same idea as well. And this is the ’70s, early ’80s, it was … so it was even worse then than it is now. And so when I started thinking about what that meant, like, to be bequeathed a particular kind of pattern of behavior before you even know if that’s what you’re supposed to do or not, like you don’t get to, like, lean into it yourself. You don’t get to figure these things out alone because you’ve already got the superstructure around you. So how do we break that apart? 

And so even as I was writing and thinking about, yeah, these are the things that boys are, it’s not actually true because there are boys who aren’t those things, and the ones who are, many of them have these same problems. They can’t tell anybody. They’ve been taught that how 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 the, if the 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. 

Ó Tuama:This brings me back to the thought about antagonist. You know, that comes up in the David Bowie. The, but the word “antagonist” is throughout your book. You know, “Somebody else sold the world, and eventually the antagonists outdo themselves by undoing themselves.”

And another place, “Antagonists all over, mostly maskless as underprepared burglars, burglars.” You quote Ben Okri in an epigraph, “Hunger is an antagonist.” I wonder if you could take us into what you’re saying about antagonists, but also hunger. Because I think just in what you’re saying there about essentially feeling lost, not knowing how to be a man, that there’s a hunger in that as well as a … as well as a violence. 

Matejka: Yeah. Yeah. So if y’all don’t know Ben Okri, he’s an incredible novelist, but also a poet who writes significant verse. He was the first Black writer to win the Booker Prize back, I think, 1991. And he wrote this essay called “While the World Sleeps” that is not online, but it’s in a book called A Way of Being Free.

And he talks about the antagonist as people. He uses that exact language. The, he, his antagonist is people who are oppositional to art and to creativity and to the life of the mind. And during COVID, it did seem like the appropriate thing to name my neighbor who had a big “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and a big Trump flag and a big Confederate flag, like those … the kind of flags you see at the auto dealership, like that size outside of his house.

And in the middle of a neighborhood that had all these sort of, you know, rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter signs, and there he was sitting on his porch with his gun across his lap, just watching us walk by every day, just full of vitriol, you know. And every once in a while, somebody would get in there and steal one of the flags, and then he would get on, there’s that, like the neighbor app. I can’t remember what it’s called because we don’t have it in Chicago. 

Unknown speaker: Nextdoor? 

Matejka: Yeah. He’d get on Nextdoor app and say, “Hey, somebody stole my flag. Did anybody see it?” And everybody else is just sort of laughing at him along the side, right? But when I was going back and trying to figure out what this … it’s a, you know, it’s a personality type, but it’s also kind of a … it’s a verb too, right? It’s a noun and a verb in a particular way. And  during COVID, there were people who aren’t actually antagonistic who became antagonists because they were just out for themselves. And he was always that, you know … this particular neighbor was always that way. But there were other people who I saw who weren’t … and all of a sudden closed up and, you know, built a moat around their house or whatever just to protect what was theirs. 

And so the more I thought about what that meant  to be antagonistic, to be someone who instigates antagonism, it felt like the perfect descriptor for 2021. And it also allowed me to bring Ben Okri back because in that particular poem, in my mind anyway, it was set back when we lived in Section 8 in a kind … And so hunger was an antagonist when we were there. We were always so hungry. And when the shelves were empty at the grocery store early on, that, for me anyway, brought back a particular memory of being concerned about food security. The neighborhood I lived in, it also was a food desert. So there were all these kinds of different things that were at play in that moment for me. 

Ó Tuama: It seems like there’s critique as well as compassion and understanding present in your usage of the word “antagonist”. 

Matejka: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Because in some of the poems, I think I’m the antagonist, you know, because I wasn’t always my best at that time. Please don’t mistake me sitting up here saying, pointing these things out for sanctimony because it’s not. There were days when I was really not good at this, as was probably true for most people. And I hope that there were more days that I was, you know, at least gentler than there were days where I was just  buying into the sort of the national fear, the global fear of this, which was real.

You know? But we didn’t always ne … I didn’t need to respond in that way. I don’t want to speak for anybody else, but there were days that I responded to it with a kind of stress and lack of empathy that was outside of my usual way of moving through the world. And so I’m complicit in that in antagonism as well.

Ó Tuama: Adrian Matejka, you’ve been so generous with giving us backgrounds to some of the poems and some of your concerns as well, and what it is that you do for your craft. Thank you very much. 

[applause]

Matejka: And thank you, Pádraig. I appreciate you having me. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

[music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan]

 

Adrian Matejka’s most recent collection of poetry is Be Easy: New and Selected Poems, which was published by W. W. Norton in 2026. He served as poet laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018 to 2019 and now lives in Chicago, where he is editor of Poetry magazine, a position he’s held since 2022. 

Deepest thanks to David Hassler, Charles Malone, Jessica Jewell, Maggie Anderson, and everyone at the Wick Poetry Center for organizing and hosting this conversation. 

[music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan]

Poetry Unbound is Andrea Prevost, Carla Zanoni, Daryl Chen, Sparrow Murray, Chris Heagle, Bill Siegmund, and me, Pádraig Ó Tuama. Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. These episodes were made in New York City on unceded Lenape land. Special thanks to Will Salwen, Adam Morel, and Sam Gerardi at Digital Island Studios in Manhattan. Thanks as well to Frederick Courtright of the Permissions Company. 

Poetry Unbound is an independent nonprofit production of The On Being Project, founded and led by Krista Tippett. Poetry Unbound is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Our other funding partners include the Liana Foundation, The Bydale Foundation,  Engaging the Senses Foundation, and the listeners who give so generously via On Being and Substack. 

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