Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Adrian Matejka

Poetry Unbound

In this episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation, poet Adrian Matejka discusses how music, improvisation, bilingual upbringing, and persona

Key takeaways

Poetry is deeply tied to music and movement, with rhythm and sound shaping both composition and reading experience.
The act of writing by hand fosters a physical connection to the poem, evoking dance-like motion even when reading silently.

Main topics

The musicality of poetry
Autobiographical writing and personal memory

Notable quotes

"If a poem doesn't swing, it's really not much of a poem."

Conclusion

Adrian Matejka's poetry emerges from a rich intersection of personal history, musical

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Hi friends, Padraig O'Tooma 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 Matika. 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 Centre in Kent, Ohio, in honour of the Centre's 40th anniversary. Deepest thanks to David Hassler and all the staff, volunteers and attendees of the Wick Poetry Centre for making this conversation such a delight. Welcome to Poetry Unbound in Conversation. My name is Padraig O'Toolema and here I am with Adrian Matika. So, good afternoon everybody. Speaker 2 (1:56) 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 Padraig O'Tooma, as David was saying, and I'm thrilled to introduce Adrian Matika, 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 Matica a warm welcome to Kent, Ohio. Speaker 2 (2:57) I'm going to start off by quoting you back to yourself, Adrian, which I'm sure you love. Here's 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? Speaker 1 (3:20) Music is everywhere in your work. Thank you, Padraig. 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. 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, it was 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. It's like a total snitch in fourth grade already, you know. And 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. Speaker 2 (4:39) I talk about music as well. Speaker 1 (4:42) Yeah, so I was a DJ. I was a radio DJ. I was a 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 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 17 syllables ain't no square poet's job. 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 who felt like they might need it. Speaker 2 (5:55) Could you read another of the Love Notes poems, the one on page 15? Yeah, Speaker 1 (5:59) 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 whenever he in spaces like this. Love notes. Do you love vague commitments? Do you love bad news and crooning shapes? That's what I mean. I can't see it. Whole or half tattoos. But you know what? I'm going to read it off my phone instead. Speaker 1 (6:28) I was just joking yesterday about this, that I'd seen Phil Metris 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... Oh, let me see if I can... Oh, let me see. Oh, that is amazing. Thank you. Just came through. What's your name? Jen, thank you so much for saving me. That's a poetry community right there. Yeah, I know. Speaker 2 (7:08) There's a metaphor for you. Speaker 1 (7:10) Yeah, that's right. That's right. So watch me read this on purpose this time. Love notes. Do you love vague commitments? Do you love bad news and crooning shapes, whole or half? Tattoos mooning on conjoined rib cages? Check this box, and like a breath, you'll feel mostly bygone. Like one of those early recordings, you'll be scratchy and demystified, untranscribably confessional until the last quarter note is a processional. You'll be absolutely fine. Flipped to the B side of this notes high-line referendum. Magnificent and stark inside the addendum. Like a big breath, exhale through the smart part of a question mark. Thank you again, John. Speaker 2 (7:57) There's a lot of ways in 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. Speaker 1 (8:36) 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 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. Speaker 2 (9:11) I Speaker 1 (9:12) 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. And Speaker 2 (9:21) when you're reading it, are you usually sitting down or do you move around when you're kind of working on something? Speaker 1 (9:27) I stand up a lot of the time when I write. It's not a standing desk situation. It's me at the kitchen. counter writing on it or someplace else on a bookshelf because I need to have my whole self. Even before I was struggling to read the print in my book, which should be large print, I realize now. 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, 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 engage your embouchure. Speaker 2 (10:12) I wonder if you could read Hearing Damage on page 11 with those magnificent readers. They look so much Speaker 1 (10:20) 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? Speaker 2 (10:28) Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:31) I'm telling you, I feel a lot cooler than I usually do. Okay. Hearing damage. I had a trumpet shaped like a downward heart and I played it recklessly. All of its ditted iterations of brass and bell, three valve marginality, marching band possibility pointing at the muddy dirt. I had a double talk as slick and overachieving as a kid trench-coated with a boombox overhead in the rain, his socks wet and ankle loose in their blueness. Argyle wonder caught up in high school's sloppy gears, greedy for moments of matriculated attention. And none of it worked. When the tape deck got soaked, the tape stopped playing. When the music stopped, her shades barked when they shut, as if attention itself magnetized, stretched around eager reels, then fed itself into the machine. click, click, click. As if my beating pleas were big trumpets for attention but gentle half notes trimmed into funny polyester hearts, future palpitations of glory. Speaker 2 (11:35) This poem feels to me like a musical autobiography. You can clap for them all. Thank Speaker 1 (11:41) 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... those moments of like early loss, those moments of early heartbreak. I think my first versions of those were in movies more than they were in my personal life. same girlfriend from sixth grade to college. Wow. 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. Speaker 2 (12:21) That's a love note that really did its work when she ticked the little yes box. Speaker 1 (12:26) 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.