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The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again. It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I'm terrible at writing overtly political poems.

Adrian Matejka

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Adrian Matejka
Age: 54
Poet
Nürnberg
Made
Feeling
Hadn
Kind
President
Somehow
Like
Feelings
Kinds
Political
Election
Kids
Terrible
Overtly
Change
Trump
Bigotry
Remember
Seen
Ownership
Writing
Since
Poems

More quotes by Adrian Matejka

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The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount. Because before that I wasn't thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever. I was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.
Adrian Matejka
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Bigotry doesn't care about state or regional lines. It's all over the place. But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it's about perception and balance sometimes I think.
Adrian Matejka
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I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years. There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back. They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
Adrian Matejka
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One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility. I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.
Adrian Matejka
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You should check out William Shatner's album The Transformed Man. It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.
Adrian Matejka
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I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn't bad... I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing. But it's become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.
Adrian Matejka