Talking about the cosmos with poet Adrian Matejka

When Adrian Matejka lived in St. Louis, he co-curated River Styx magazine’s reading series. Now he’s returning as a reader, with a new book, Map to the Stars. Though he’s best known for his 2013 Pulitzer Prize–nominated book The Big Smoke, which tells the story of boxer Jack Johnson, Matejka’s entire oeuvre is critically acclaimed, each book marvelously different from the next other than its lapidarian attention to detail and generosity of spirit toward the reader. We talked to him about poetry, geography, and (of course) outer space. Hear him read, along with novelist Kea Wilson, on November 20 at the Contemporary Art Museum, 3750 Washington.

I wanted to start with your appearance at the DiveDapper Festival and this whole notion of “user-friendly poetry.” This school of what I once heard described as the “skittery, elliptical” poetry seems to be on its way out, for a variety of reasons. Can you talk a little bit about that, and about accessibility in poetry?

The DiveDapper Poetry Carnival was big fun. So many amazing, generous poets sharing their work under a big top including a few writers from the St. Louis area: francine j. harris, who teaches at Wash. U., and Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble, who both teach at SIU Carbondale and are regulars at St. Louis literary events. There was beer, mini-corndogs, and face painting, too, so you know the afternoon was a success. DiveDapper’s founder, Kaveh Akbar, has created a was a wonderful showcase for the range of poetry styles.

Here’s the thing: all poetry is oppositional. Poems can be in opposition to memory, for example, or a type of politics or certain kinds of emotional or sonic impulses. There’s also the mode the poetry operates in—whether it wants to tell a story, wants to make a direct political critique, etc. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but the kind of elliptical, inattentive poetry you mention seemed to blossom (or maybe more ironically, gain a larger audience) in opposition to the more open, narrative verse being written in the 1990s. It was considered old-fashioned to be direct, and so poems became more and more insular. Which makes sense, really, because at the heart of narrative poetry is the desire to share. Communication the most fundamental need of the work, so the poet has to be concerned with accessibility and connecting with the reader.

I think about accessibility in poems all of the time. For me, a poem should be a kind of meeting place where ideas are exchanged between the poet and reader. A poet can shape that meeting place any way they want as long as they are aware that the reader matters. And in this arrangement, the poet has to do their part, but the reader has to work as well. In other words, accessibility doesn’t equal “easy.” Accessibility simply means the poet is actively working to offer the reader ways into the poem, rather than writing language that’s only concerned with itself. I think we need that kind of effort to communicate inside and outside of poetry right now. Maybe through communication, we might be able to build a different, more aware community.

In earlier interviews, you’ve mentioned the influence of geography on your poetry (specifically how moving back to Indiana affected Map to the Stars.) You were still in St. Louis when you were composing Mixology and The Big Smoke, right? It’s been a while, I realize, but I was curious how St. Louis/Southern Illinois influenced your voice, your writing practice, and the shape of the poems, and how that’s differed from the process of writing the newer books—outside of St. Louis.

St. Louis—both the city itself and the brilliant literary community residing there—has had a profound influence on my work and processes. I mean, there are so many incredible poets (I started to name drop some of my favorites and got to 12 poets before giving up) working in a range of aesthetics in a relatively small geography. And that’s not even taking into account all of the writers working in the larger Metro East area. It is inspiring on many levels. I’m so much closer to being able to write the kind of poem I want to write thanks to what I learned from the writers in St. Louis and working with River Styx and Sou’wester.  

I wrote most of Mixology and The Big Smoke while I still in the STL area, and started some early drafts that ended up being the basis for Map to the Stars. In fact, I was at Dressell’s having a drink below one of those remarkable sketches of writers when I started thinking about the different ways place can be a character in a poem. I mean, why aren’t there more poems about Dressell’s? Or Tower Grove Park or that crazy bust of T.S. Eliot in front of Left Bank Books? Geography can be a great normalizer for the reader and can help a poem to communicate its intentions more directly. It’s easier to understand what is happening if you know where it’s happening, if you see what I mean.

There’s also separate, younger sibling complex happening here, too. Writers in the most populous cities—New York, Chicago, and L.A. especially—represent for their areas with the kind of fervor usually reserved for sports fans. Writers in Brooklyn wear T-shirts that say “Brooklyn” while writing a short story about Brooklyn and they name drop streets and train lines and sneaker stores with the expectation that the rest of us will figure it out. Why don’t people from STL, Indianapolis, Kansas City, or the other medium-sized cities do that? I tried to represent Indianapolis in Map to the Stars in a way that shows awareness of and respect to its complicated history while also acknowledging that the geography might be less familiar to those who aren’t from the Midwest.

You mentioned in your interview with the Southeast Review that the latest book became Map to the Stars only at the last minute—that the first title was Collectible Blacks, and focused on America’s abusive attitude towards Black bodies. You also mentioned that political poetry wasn’t something that came easily to you, though in the end the poems stayed true to the themes you wanted to bring out, even though it wasn’t as overt. Can you talk a little bit about poetry’s relationship to politics? In your work and in others’?

Somebody smarter than me said that all art is political, and I think that’s certainly true of poetry. The big question is how the politics manifest themselves inside of the poem and to what end. I learned about poetry by reading the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement—including East St. Louis’s Poet Laureate Eugene B. Redmond who has had a great influence on me—and the politics of race, class, and economics are in the foreground of many of the poems from both movements.

Black Arts Movement poetry in particular was built on the idea that poetry could inform and inspire. That means so much to me—thinking of a poem as a thing that can inspire and incite and create tension. American poets are the most fortunate of fortunate artistic protesters because, despite this current administration’s enabling of bigots and knuckleheads, we still mostly have free speech. In other countries, poetry is recognized as dangerous and incendiary in a way that can land the poet in prison or worse.

Which is all to say I wanted to write a book very directly critiquing all of the ways black culture is collected and codified while black people are treated as disposable. I wanted to write book of protest like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sonia Sanchez. I think I wrote about 15 pages of that book, but at some point, my lyric impulses undercut the protest and it became clear to me that I hadn’t written a book that had earned the title Collectable Blacks. I liked the title so much I kept trying to make it work, though, until the day I sent the final proofs back to my editor.

You’ve also mentioned in prior interviews the influence of sound and music—including Sun Ra, Parliment, and the Voyager Golden Record. What’s your writing playlist?Do you listen to music when you’re working on poems?

I have music playing constantly whether I’m writing or not. I was a DJ for a while, so music is part of the way I wander through the world. Right now, Nicolas Jaar’s Space is Only Noise is playing as I’m responding to these questions. The music helps me think in complete sentences.

The word “music” comes from the Greek word mousike, which means “art of the Muses,” so it is probably not a surprise that particular songs inspire my creative work. Music is neurologically connected to long-term memory via the sensory cortex, too, so music is a great enabler of memories. While I was working on Map to the Stars, almost everything I listened to was recorded prior to 1988 (when the book ends): Sun Ra’s Strange Celestial Roads, Parliament’s Mothership Connection, Prince’s Dirty Mind, and Run DMC’s King of Rock were in constant rotation while I was generating the poems for the book.

In this era of hyper-hybridity, it seems that a lot of poets are also heavily influenced by other media, including film, visual art, and emojis. What do your non-poetry poetry influences include?

Other than music, my main non-poetry influences are stories however they appear—from my friends, from history books, graphic novels, comedians, or documentaries. I love the way that the form in which a story or myth appears creates different kinds of narrative possibilities. A graphic novel’s way of telling a story is different from the way my uncle recounts the last time he danced on Soul Train. A Richard Pryor monologue with all of his facial expressions and gestures works differently than the voice over in a documentary. Each mode offers unexpected opportunities for conversation between the artist and the audience.

Narrative opportunity is one of the reasons I spend so much time listening to and watching Richard Pryor. He was one of the great storytellers of the 20th century. He knew exactly what needed to be done in order to open things up for the audience and keep them engaged. Many poets would be better writers if we spent more time studying Richard Pryor or Moms Mabley or Dave Chappelle. Comedians are aware that they are on the clock and tailor their stories accordingly. We poets could benefit from a similar kind of urgency.

What’s on your reading list right now? What would you recommend?

Even though this has been a garbage year socially and politically, it has been the best years for new poetry I can remember. I’ve got four incredible 2017 books on my desk at this minute: Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic, Marie Howe’s Magdalene, Shara McCallum’s Madwoman, and Marcus Wicker’s Silencer. All four books question identity in unexpected ways and with a range of sophisticated aesthetics.  

Beyond these, I’ve read so many exemplary books published this year including work by Kaveh Akbar, Shane McRae, Rodney Jones, Patricia Smith, and Craig Morgan Teitcher.  I have another to-read stack next to my desk that includes new books by Danez Smith, Nicole Sealey, and Javier Zamora. There have just been so many stellar new books of poetry this year I couldn’t figure out how to pick just one.

You’re working on a graphic novel as well. Can you touch on that a bit, who you’re collaborating with, topic, format, et cetera? How has that process differed from the poem-making process?

The graphic novel is called Last On His Feet and is the second part of the Jack Johnson project. It picks up after The Big Smoke ends. When I started the graphic script, I figured I’d knock it out in a year. Three years and about five complete script rewrites later, I’ve finally got a narrative that I think shows the proper respect to Jack Johnson’s story.

We’re still in the process of negotiating contracts, so I can’t really say anything about the illustrator I’ve been working with yet. But the process has been so illuminating. I’ve learned so much about collaboration and storytelling. I’m fortunate because this illustrator is full of wisdom and has helped me navigate the process.

Graphic writing is completely different from writing poetry. While so much of a poem happens in the imaginary and in between images, everything in the graphic novel script has to be articulated. I see things a little differently now in terms of character and scene construction, so I’m looking forward to seeing how this process has influenced my approach to poetry.

And lastly, since you are a poet that just released an astronomy-themed collection, I have to ask: where were you during the Great Eclipse of 2017?

We kept our daughter home from school and watched the eclipse in our backyard here in Bloomington. We weren’t in the path of totality, but we had 94% coverage so it was majestic. The most fascinating thing for me was the stillness during the event—it seemed like the wind stopped blowing and the animals stayed still the whole time.  Every stopped for fear of looking upward.