Imagining a Soundtrack for America: Adrian Matejka on the practice of poetry, celebrity culture, and the condition of wanting

Adrian Matejka was born in Germany as part of a military family. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His next collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017.

His mixed media collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books), was published in 2021. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century was published in February 2023 by Liveright.

Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19. He currently lives in Chicago and is the Editor of Poetry magazine.

On May 4th, 2023, Adrian Matejka joined The Interlochen Review editors Bella Rotker, Elizabeth Keller, Greer Engle-Roe, and Rowen Erickson for a conversation about his poetry collections Somebody Else Sold the World and Map to the Stars, and his graphic novel Last on His Feet.

GREER ENGLE-ROE: In many of your poems in Somebody Else Stole the World, there is a lot of attention to sound, for example, “sound in the wheelhouse,” “furnaces wind-up huffing,” “crescendos like background singers,” and there are a lot of musical references through the Gymnopedies poems, and musical instruments within pieces. Do you have a musical background? 

ADRIAN MATEJKA: I was first chair of French horn when I was in eighth grade. That's about the extent of my musical background. At the same time, I wanted to be a rapper—this was in the 1980s when emceeing really wasn't a thing, at least not in Indianapolis. Also I was really bad at it. What I learned from trying to rap though, was [that] there's a kind of sprung rhythm between words and beats that you can hear if you listen to it closely enough. There's a scholar named Adam Bradley who writes about rap music and poetry. Everyone should check out his book Book of Rhymes. He calls that the “dual rhythmic relationship”—the way that music creates a rhythm, the way that poetry or language creates a rhythm. And the best rappers understand that relationship. The worst ones like me, have no concept of how that goes. Later on, I was in a band in college, and it still didn't improve my musicality. I was on the mic, but not that much better of a rapper than I was when I was a kid. I think the music you might be picking up in the poem is just a function of language.

The best language just sounds good. English is an awful sounding language. It's got no swing at all, especially not compared to something like Italian or Spanish or French, where they have so many different kinds of rhymes than we do. So poetry's job is to make the language sound better, to make it sound like music. I was teaching a class about rap music and poetry when I was working on Somebody Else and we talked about the fourteen different kinds of rhyme, about alliteration and anaphora and epistrophe. I didn't mean for it to be in the poems, but it seeped into them as I was thinking about it.

ELIZABETH KELLER: In a similar vein, all of the quotes from the references to music in Somebody Else Sold the World come from different musical genres or styles. There's David Bowie, there's rap, there's classical music. I was wondering how you chose the music to fit together into your broader project. Did you choose the songs first? Did they just come into the poems? I know one of the sections of the book deals with the idea of song entropy, music dissolving into chaos. Did that play into that process at all? 

AM: Yeah. I mean, imagine a soundtrack for Covid lockdown and figuring out how to be in that time. I was a radio DJ and a party DJ for a long time. So I was able to soothe myself during lockdown by getting my turn-tables back out and giving myself the space to mix in a way that I hadn't in a very long time. And so it was a lot of fun for about a week, and then my wife was like, no more David Bowie, no more. I was also overplaying an album called WUNNA from Gunna and she was like, okay, enough of that album, too. There are some things that I got really hooked on and I tried to mix and match those albums. Those songs ended up inspiring the poems in the book. In the back of the book there's a playlist that was built out during that time. Prince, Al Green, Portishead, those kinds of things. Lots of ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s. Not very much contemporary. 

GER: In your broader writing practice, what role does music play? Do you listen to songs with the intention to be inspired by them? 

AM: I always have music playing when I write. It never has words though, because if those words appear, they might appear in the poems, and that's not the way that poems work, at least not for me. I don't want someone else dictating the language that I use. And so I listen to a lot of electronic, jazz, and classical music. In “Gymnopedies,” pieces came in because Erik Satie’s [music] sounds like electronic, even though it's from the 1800s. It's really brilliant stuff. So that's always spinning and I'm always thinking about the cadences of it. Sometimes the songs become legible in the poems where you can see how, "yeah, that's right, that's a quote." But a lot of times it's just between me and the music and then the words manifest differently.

I'm thinking about that chaos piece that you're talking about. Sometimes the raw music can cause chaos in a poem, and I think that that's why I'm very careful about how I curate the music I listen to. At some point during Covid, I was listening to this album, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. It’s really dense and dark. It's just like, there's no poems in that for you. I have to listen to things that are going to lift me because I don't need to be pushed down or anything, especially not when I was working on this book. We were all pretty low at that point.

EK: You touched on this a little bit, but going a little deeper into the idea of writing poems to music, in the notes for Somebody Else Sold the World, there were a couple of poems where you were like, "I wrote this poem to this specific song." What does that mean for you or what does that process look like?

AM: As a reader and as a writer, I'm a big fan of legacy and genealogy. I love poems where you can read and say, oh, this person likes Sharon Olds, or this person likes Yusef Komunyakaa, just by the way that they mess with language. Sometimes it's not so clear, what in a poem is inspired by something outside of poetry. Unless someone says "this is inspired by a painting," unless the inspiration is announced, you can't always tell what the catalyst for piece was. 

So much of it, it starts inside of us, right? I usually would not do this, but I made the choice that I wanted people to know what songs were the atmosphere for those poems. I wanted people to know what was out there—you see the poem, then you go back and listen to the music and it might bring you to something that you didn't know before, like a bibliography, instead of a notes section. Hopefully there's some musicians in here that you didn't know about that maybe you know about now. 

BELLA ROTKER: Much of your work, especially in your collection, The Big Smoke, seems to be interested in the ideas and images that define identity and its cultural implications, especially with regard to gender and race, as well as overarching themes like trauma and grief. How do you view the relationship between the poet and the reader in these contexts?

AM: When you were making the list of things that I was preoccupied with, it made me realize I'm also really invested in the idea of celebrity and what celebrity means, and maybe that's the writer part, like what “celebrity” means to the celebrity. It means one thing to the people close to that person, and it probably means something different to the people who receive that celebrity. We all have these attachments to, or relationships with celebrity, whether it's something that we embrace or reject. I have no understanding of what it might be like to be a celebrity. 

I was reading something about Jack Johnson the other day and thinking about how lonely he must have been—separate from all of his successes and failures as a human being—to be the only Black person in the world who had ever been heavyweight champion of the world. You couldn't even go back and look at somebody else and be like, “well, this is what happened to that guy, let me learn from it.” It was just him. Even as he's embracing all of the good things that come with that, money and attention and all that, it's also uncharted and difficult. 

The only two people who were maybe equatable to Jack Johnson at the time were W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. Neither of them made any money, but were at least known as intellectuals and public figures. There was just Jack Johnson. Nobody else was a celebrity like that. And even in some ways, he became the model for them later—fancy clothes, gold teeth, cars, all these women around him—he became a model for a 20th century athlete. That must've just been really hard. So, trying to make that available for a reader who might not be invested in him, and when you read the book, it's not like he's a good guy. You start to see all of the scenes, and by the end of it he's a really complex figure who did some good things and some things that weren't good. And I think that's the reader's charge—they decide how they want to manage that.

EK: A lot of your poems, in general, but especially in Somebody Else Sold the World are made of this sonically beautiful listing of images and are interested in cataloging or observation. You also deal with a lot of heavy themes like the pandemic and gun violence. I was interested in your approach to addressing these issues in your poetry, especially through the idea of cataloging and the accretion of all these images in this collection. 

AM: Yeah, I love lists. I make them all the time and my desk at work is full of them. Some are just lists of things I have to do. But other things are things I want to do, words I'm really interested in that day, songs I want to remember to listen to when I get home. I just have lists all around me. 

Ross Gay is one of the great listers in poetry. His book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude was full of all these beautiful lists. His lists are environmental lists, they're natural lists, they're lists of the world. My lists are kind of more like lists of technology, lists of the head and lists of more enclosed spaces. They don't really branch out into bees and flowers, because so much of my day is in a room thinking about things, which are really beautiful, but with a window that I can see out. I'm like, “oh yeah, there are trees out there. Maybe I'll get out there later.” So my lists tend to be catalogs of the world in that particular moment. The big secret about lists is that they're great for music in poems. You leave it to the reader to figure out what the listed words actually mean, but you can make up all kinds of cool sounds in lists. So there's my own need to make frames for the world and using lists is that. Then there's also this poetic part.

During Covid when things shrunk even more I was trying to figure out ways to catalog the minutiae for my later self. I wasn't thinking of it as a book. It wasn't something that I was writing to be like, "I'm going to write a book about Covid." I thought I was writing a book of love poems. And then [as] a pathway through the process of “what does a love poem look like?” I was thinking about these other things. 

I don't know if this is true for you all, but I am a terrible writer of love poems. Any kind of romantic poems. I'm horrible at writing, in part because they never do a good job of representing how I'm actually feeling. A poem is a very private experience. It's almost always based on something that's happening to you, or happening to us in a moment. And then we're trying to figure out what language to pattern so someone who's not us can experience that in a way too. Take love, and the way that people respond to that or don't respond to it, or beauty and the weighting of what one person thinks is beautiful versus somebody else. At some point the list becomes the way that you can manage all of that.  Love is all seventeen things at once. It's bees and file cabinets, it's perfume and sandwiches. There's no real way to line them up that will make sense to anybody. 

The best poems are pretty encoded. They're pretty private. And then other people find their way into it. Writing a poem that imagines that it's going to let someone else into it is probably going to fail because it's not for everybody. It's for you, and then you're sharing it with everybody. Lists are a really great tool for connecting. They're important for how we make a document of our lives. 

ROWEN ERICKSON: When reading through Somebody Else Sold the World, there's a lot of curious imagery about warmth and body that we continue to circle around. In many of your written work, these bodily experiences are described through out-of-the-norm means. I noticed it a lot in your poem "End of Side A." How does this intense emotion and image set affect your work?

AM: When I said I thought I was writing a love poem, I was also writing a-few-years-after-a-divorce poem, too. Trying to figure out how I spent all of this time with a person who is no longer part of what I do and what that world looks like afterward. Much of the change is for the better and yet there things that are no longer possible—how you balance those lost things and while recognizing empirically that the choices that were made were the right ones. 

I was trying to figure out how to do all of that in a way that would be careful, but also celebrating the possibilities. It's a cliché, but all endings are actually beginnings—now what, now you can do anything, what am I going to do now? And that applies to quitting a job, that applies to finishing a poem. 

I was trying to figure out how to honor loss, but also celebrate renewal. I landed on the love notes poems that are in there because when I was a kid that's what we would do. If you liked somebody in your class—we're talking about third or fourth grade here—you’d write a little note and it said, "Do you like me? Check this box," and then pass it across the desk. If things went well it would come back to you with a yes. If things went like they usually did, the teacher would see it and snatch it up and read it. Even worse if it had already been checked and she checked no, and now the teacher is reading it to the class. That was so embarrassing. What a humiliating kind of pedagogy that is, but that's how they did it in the ‘70s.  I wanted to revive the love note and I was honestly a little bit worried that [readers] under thirty wouldn't know what I was talking about. But then I found out people still do this—some things like love transcend technology. 

Those poems became a lot of fun to write. I never read them at readings because they embarrass me. I'm not used to being so emotive and my wife is like, "you think that these poems say a lot of personal things, but they don't. They're pretty encoded." I feel like they're pretty honest. If something embarrasses you, you probably hit on something with more integrity. So the fact that they still embarrass me, even though it's been out in the world for a couple of years, it's because I'm not used to being open like that. I spent eighteen years writing behind the persona of Jack Johnson. So it was me thinking about things and being legible emotionally, but it was somebody else's experience. In Map to the Stars, I was a kid, so I'm thinking backwards like thirty-five years. To be present and to be directed about those things becomes a little bit of a different event.

RE: There's a very roundabout quality that extends from your titles, to your work, and leaves a feeling of change and reflection in almost every poem in Somebody Else Sold the World. I've found this specific change often comes from how you manipulate your image sets and our emotional distance. How do you continue this journey even in some of your shorter poems? 

AM: When you said "roundabout" it feels like my answers, too, like everything I do is kind of roundabout, or meandering. My biological father was a dancer on Soul Train back in the 1970s. We used to have these huge disco parties where they would play all the hits at the time. I was an only kid back then, so I'd be in the back room. I wasn't allowed to come out to the parties, but my whole childhood was surrounded by music and dance. That was a kind of enactment of things that weren't linear. You start with one kind of move on the dance floor and then you shift to something else. There wasn't anything to signify that shift except for maybe a change in the music. 

I didn't realize until later that I was carrying that with me in terms of the way that I saw art, or when I was trying to be a rapper, when I was trying to be a DJ. There's a cadence that you create on your own that becomes the point from which things shift or turn into a poem. We've got the volta at the end. But you can have voltas in the middle, right? Trying to figure out how to master that volta, wherever it popped up, became a kind of mission. It didn't happen in my first book, maybe by my second book I started to figure out that you could do things like that, not only inside of the poem, but with the way in which the poem ends. For a while I was trying to end poems like the band Portishead. They have an album called Third, and in some of the songs, the music would just stop. It would sound like the thing was going to keep going and all of a sudden there was nothing else happening. I could be in the middle of a movement of music and it was just somebody lifting up the record needle. I said, "what happens if you do that in a poem?" What happened was, I would be reading the poem and the audience would sit there waiting for the next line, and I'd have to say, "that's it. That's the whole poem." 

Starting to think about how we play with expectation and starts and stops, Map to the Stars became the culmination of that. Figuring out how to make progressions in the middle of poems, shift the way that we expect the volta, and hopefully always attach it to an image that could carry it. Images are the engine of the poem. That's the thing that is going to get the reader from one place to the next. And how you build up those image systems or image sets is vital. I have some people on my editorial team who don't like images. If we don't like images, then what? They're the thing that makes a poem three-dimensional. Otherwise you just have somebody talking to you, it might as well be a memo.

BR: In a Poetry Off the Shelf interview, you mentioned that your interest in outer space began in childhood. And that your fascination with space informs your poetic voice. How has this interest in outer space evolved and influenced your writing? In particular, how do you approach creating concrete and evocative images out of scientific and more abstract concepts? Your writing often blends scientific and earth grounded imagery. How do you see the balance between these two image sets in your work, and how do you approach setting them up to explore larger themes in so many different ways?

AM: I'm a huge fan of space-based stuff. When I was a kid, we were so poor. It was just like, if I could just get up there, if I could be on the Starship Enterprise or something, I wouldn't be hungry. I could be with Han Solo and Chewbacca. They never eat—you just see them and they're just always fighting and doing cool things. They're never worried about hunger in those shows, right? So I'm watching them, I'm thinking if I could just be there. I know it’s science fiction, but that's where it started. And also, I'm a kid of the ‘80s where we used to stop class to watch space shuttle launches. They'd roll this black and white TV in, we'd all watch this shuttle launching together. There was a kind of wonder to it, a kind of nationalism. Like, “look at us, we've got a spaceship.” They can go into orbit and come back down. That's so cool.

Ann Druyan is  the scientist who selected  the music on the Golden Record attached to the Voyager space probe. When they sent Voyager out into the universe, they attached a record with all these images and music and documents about Earth, and there's a design on the side of how to build a record player in case whoever finds it doesn't have one. And some scientists are like, “why are we giving them a map to come back and take over the planet?” And others are like, “this is how we communicate with the universe.” I spent a long time studying space exploration before I wrote Map to the Stars—I used it as an opportunity to learn more about the space race and our desire to explore what goes beyond our solar system.

For me, the poem is both an emotional and intellectual expression, but it's also an opportunity. If I don't know something and I feel like it would be good for a poem, then I go spend some time in the archives and learn about it. I went to DC to go to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum where they have a replica of the Voyager, and spent a good amount of time listening to the sounds on the Golden Record. There's a poem in the middle of the book called “Sounds of Earth” that’s based on the recordings. And right now that probe is further away from earth than anything any human has ever created. There's a human heartbeat on a record out in space where the sun no longer exerts itself. And it's not just a human heartbeat. Ann Druyan recorded her heart thinking about Carl Sagan who was her boyfriend at the time. So it's a heartbeat in love. Very cool. It's really easy for us to get caught up in our own gravity and I'm not that interesting. So I spend a lot of time learning about the things around me to add that texture to that. 

RE: In Somebody Else Sold the World, many of your poems are single stanza poems or tercets. Tercets are widely used as a rule of threes and for their use of transformation. What draws you to tercets specifically, in the use of the project of your poems?

AM: I went for sprawl.  I love tercets because of symmetry, but also because a tercet is a complete story to me. Every one has a beginning and a middle and an end. I love couplets just as much though, because if you write a couplet, there's no place to hide. You can't stash weak language in the middle of it. It's like everything is bare, every part of the couplet is being touched by space. Every word is given its own sunlight. So it has to be tight, otherwise people will see it. 

GER: There are eight pieces titled “Somebody Else Sold The World” in the collection. Each section begins with it. How are the sections organized and what drew you to the phrase in its place, in the collection? 

AM: I originally thought this was going to be a book without sections because I couldn't figure out how to catalog what we were going through. And it felt like it was all one really long day. I wanted the book to [be structured] like that and my editor had a different, better idea. So I can't really take credit for this organizational structure. He was like, “what if each one of these sections started with one of the Somebody Else poems or close with one of those poems. What would that look like? I think you would give everybody a little bit of time to breathe, because this is a pretty relentless book.” So I went back and started thinking about five sections and how I could deploy those movements. Then the shape just announced itself. There was a section about all of the loss that happened in that time, but also in my personal life around that time. And then the protests happened, [so] there's another space about violence and how we navigate that. 

But also at the same time I was writing another book about Funkadelic, an art book, with two visual artists. It's the size of a CD and on one side it's a chapbook about this album called Maggot Brain. And then you flip it over and there's another chapbook about this album called Standing on the Verge of Getting It On. Jack White from the White Stripes, he loves books and records, things that aren't digital. He started a book company that's attached to his record company called Third Man Books. The editor came to me and asked me if I wanted to do something about Funkadelic. And so we just went nuts with it and made this, double-sided tête-bêche: a book that you can flip over into two different books. They used to use that as a way to produce cheap science fiction and fantasy novels back in the ‘60s where you go and you buy it and get two books for the price of one. So we used that idea and hopefully made two cool books out of it. So I got to do these two projects, one that was just really weird and fun, and one that was less fun in places, but more along the lines of what I wanted to do. 

EK: I was wondering how you approach placing visual art and poetry in conversation with each other as you put together that collection. Did that inform your relationship to your piece? 

AM: It was a really great process. One of the artists, Kevin Neireiter, is a very old friend of mine,  we went to school together. He went to the Art Institute of Chicago and then transferred to IU because he wanted to be out of the city. He lives in Seattle and paints and plays music. Just living a beautiful life. Nicholas Galanin, the artist who did the other part of the book, he's got art everywhere. He’s a famous Indigenous artist and also the singer in a band called Ya Tseen. So they have different approaches to how they bring their art into the world, but they both love music and they both love poetry. I gave Kevin the Standing on the Verge collection of poems, and he came back with this really cool collage. Nicholas, I gave him four of the poems and he started making art, and then I wrote some more poems—we went back and forth with it. Both were really fun collaborative projects. It changed the way I thought about the music, because the other two people I'm working with are both incredible visual artists, but also exceptional musicians. So their relationship with what Funkadelic is doing is very different from mine. They understand those progressions differently than I do, and it manifested in their art. 

BR: Several of the pieces in Somebody Else Sold the World include quotes as epigraphs, which often contain references to pop culture and literature. How you see these epigraphs in relation to the poems and to you as the poet. Do you intend them to be read as a jumping off point, like a way into the poem or as a new way of interpreting what's already there on the page?

AM: I don't know if you use epigraphs very often, but they're tricky. Because one thing you don't want to use is a James Baldwin or Tony Morrison epigraph, because it's going to always be better than what we write, right? You have to be careful about the work that you choose so it doesn't outshine what you're doing. But I think about it as creating an atmosphere. In Somebody Else Sold the World in particular, is this extensive notes page where I announce where the inspirations come from. But if you just have the poem, and the poem is appearing in a magazine someplace, that epigraph can lead you to the inspiration, but it also creates a different atmosphere for the poem. If you see a quote from Portishead and you know what that music sounds like, then you hear that music hopefully while you're with the poem, so it becomes a soundtrack, an extratextual thing. 

EK: You just published a new graphic novel, and I know sometimes there’s a connection between genre (like, the experience of writing a dramatic monologue can be similar to that of a poem). Could you share a little bit about the process of working on that graphic novel and did your background in poetry inform that experience?

AM: Usually when I write a book of poems I’m doing readings from the poems before the book comes out and it feels like I’m workshopping the poems as I’m doing readings. Trying to figure out if they resonate or not. I couldn’t do that with the graphic novel because I needed a complete piece of it to be able to share and I never had a complete piece of it. We worked all the way until the deadline and past it to get the whole thing together, so there was never a moment when I was traveling and I could say, “hey guys, let me show you a little bit of this graphic novel that’s about to come out.” 

It was a different process because I was reliant on someone else for so much of it. My part of it was done maybe a year before the actual book was done. I went in and did some edits and added some things around the new art, so it was collaborative and it was also complicated because as poets we rely on ourselves. I had to be considerate of [the artist’s] creative whims. I think what ended up happening was I wrote the script, Youssef started to draw, and then he’d be like “I don’t see this, something is missing. Can you write a poem?” And I was like, “Well, poems don’t really work like that, Youssef, I can’t write them as filler.” And he’s like, “I need it in a week because we need to turn this in.” So I ended up writing forty new poems. And at some point, some of them became overtext and some of them became actual poems inside of the book. 

I didn’t want to write more poems because I’d already written some for The Big Smoke. I wanted it to be a graphic novel that leaned into an art book, but Youssef also wanted to center poetry in the book. So we sometimes had divergent ideas about parts of the book. We agreed that we wanted to focus on impressionism and the idea of Jack Johnson’s life, not a panel-by-panel discussion of how he moved through the world. So in the book there are sections that look like a regular graphic novel where they’re walking around and having dialogue, and there are other really impressionistic sections that rely on poetry to move them, or just Youssef’s art. Those were my favorite parts of it. This panel-by-panel work, you can find versions in every graphic novel, but the big multi-page spreads with the impressionistic art is more unique. So Youssef started doing more of them and eventually felt more comfortable with them. 

So much of collaboration is just how the artists negotiate each other’s needs. My agent Holly told me that our collaboration isn’t usually how graphic production works. Usually I’d have given the artist the script and walked away. They'd have drawn it and I would have approved the drawings and we would be done. But Youssef and I agreed to go back and forth, which added three years to the project, but also made an infinitely better book. I could never have created what we created together on my own. 

It was good to rely on someone who actually knew what they were doing because I had no idea at all what I was getting into and my first script was a mess…Youssef told me, “you should study Quentin Tarantino’s script from Inglorious Bastards.” I don’t like Quentin Tarantino, so I went and found the script from the movie Moonlight from Barry Jenkins. It was so beautifully written that the script made me cry. If a script can be written  with this kind of pathos, then I’m going to try to write this Jack Johnson script like this. If I can write it with this kind of intensity and care then I’ll have a beautiful book. And the place where you might see that the most if you read the graphic novel is at the very end. There’s a scene at the end where Jack and Etta are sitting together and that is directly in response to having read the script from Moonlight. 

RE: Last night you said that you have to do another graphic novel. I was wondering if you’d follow the same process as you did for this one or if there would be any changes that you’d make?

AM: I want to do something about 1980s rap music, maybe something a little more autobiographical so one change will probably be working with some new artists. I’m excited to learn more about graphic novel art and Youssef’s style and archival interests aren’t directed toward hip hop. I’m excited to get started, I just haven’t had time. 

The last year has been busy taking over Poetry magazine and having the book come out and traveling with it. I’ve got some ideas for the script, I’ve started to write bits and pieces, but I have to be able to sit. It’s not like a poem, I can’t do it in bits. I need to sit down for a whole weekend and write, get out some version of it and then start to build out that version, because I need to know how it ends to be able to write the rest of it. That’s one of the things I learned from Youssef: I need to know how the story ends in a graphic. Whereas in a poem, I don’t want to know how it ends,  if I know how it ends I can’t write a good poem. It’s totally a different object; the discovery is different. Writing a script, I’m trying to figure out how we got there. Writing a poem, I’m trying to figure out where I’m going. 

EK: I know this is still an ongoing process but is there any advice that you could share about balancing your writing practice with all your other projects and editing work? Is there anything you’ve figured out so far? 

AM: Well, I’ve figured out I’m really bad at finding the balance. But I think what it requires is changing your priorities. I mean, in my life I have a sort of a tripod balance where I have my family and my work as a creative person and my work as a professional person. Usually the creative and the professional smash together, so then I have my self-care piece where I need to be at the gym, having time to be still. Right now, I’m going to the gym and taking care of myself but I’ve been traveling,  so I’m not seeing my wife very much and also my editorial work is overwhelming everything, so the balance is completely off-kilter. That’s it, though. Finding that equilibrium, whether it be, “you know what, I’m sorry, I can’t hang out tonight, I can’t watch that show with you, I need to work,” or, “you know what, I’d love to do that extra piece at my job but instead I need to go to the gym.” Figuring out what you need to do. And it shifts every day, it’s not like every day I’m going to be up at 5 am and write, it’s not possible. At some point that burns you out. At 5am I’m tired, I’m not trying to write, but maybe at 5 am I can drag myself to the gym, which doesn’t require the same kind of cognitive processing.

So figuring out how your day works, and building your practice around that to be flexible. I can’t work in the daytime because I’m in meetings all day. I know there’s not going to be a moment where I can break out for an hour and try to write a poem. So, I scheduled, on Fridays, a writing session for my team. It’s very selfish but it’s selfish for them, too. Everyone on the team is a writer so we  take a moment on Friday and write for ourselves during the work day. While we’re doing all of this work for other poets and other writers, let’s take a moment to write for ourselves. And it’s selfish because the weekend is a time where I can write, so I’m starting my weekend by writing on Friday and picking it back up on Saturday and Sunday. And that was something that I figured out when I was not working enough. 

I should also say that I spend all day talking about and thinking about and reading poems, so when I get home, the last thing I want to do is write a poem. And that wasn’t something that I anticipated. I thought the opposite would be true, that reading all these poems would be inspiring, that I’d be like, “yeah, I can’t wait to get home and write my own.” Absolutely not. When I get home I’m like, “man, look at my notebook, my notebook’s got cobwebs on it. I don’t even want to go there. It’s 6:30, I’ve been doing this all day.” So I had to make the weekend to become part of this practice, and that required also the support of my family, where I’d say “I need to tune out for a few hours each day, I know we haven’t seen each other but I need this time in order to maintain my practice.” Having a good partner is key to that. 

BR: Your work largely takes on themes of outer space and astronomy as well as the natural world or nature versus artificial and man made. The stars in Map to the Stars can be read as astronomical bodies or societal in the way that we call celebrities stars, creating a really interesting duality in which both are untouchable or larger than life. Do you view this use of duality in the imagery as a commentary on celebrity culture? How do you reconcile your fascination with space, which is often seen as a larger than life concept, with the portrayal of celebrities in a similarly untouchable or beyond reach kind of way? 

AM: Like we were talking about earlier, I’m really interested in celebrity in a way that I didn’t realize I was, and how that works locally but also kind of globally. When I was growing up a celebrity was a very different thing than they are now. Like the Kardashians, the kind of people where I was like “what is your actual talent?” That kind of celebrity was so confusing to me because I’d come up with the kind of celebrity that’s more, “ I can play sixteen instruments and sing,” or Paul Newman, this super handsome incredible actor—there was quantifiable talent. I understand now that there’s a totally different kind of talent required to become what reality personalities were able to become. I get that now. But the first time, I was like, “what in the world, why is this person on my screen? They don’t do anything. They don’t have any talent.” It really fractured my idea of what a celebrity was—a space where if I can perform the silliest stunt, people will pay attention to me. I think it was the difference between celebrity and attention. But now it’s baked into how people operate in the world. Now there’s a real possibility that if you do the right, wacky thing you can go viral and get those checks. 

So I think part of what is happening in that book and what’s happening in my whole practice is trying to reconcile what celebrity is on the local level. When I was a kid, the richest person in my very poor neighborhood was a drug dealer, which is an old stereotype but true. The difference in my neighborhood was this dude’s name was Roy and he was this white guy who used to wear cut-off jeans and flip flops and no shirt and he sold any kind of drug that you could sell. He also had a projection screen TV back when they were huge objects which took like six people to move in and an Atari, the original video game home system, he would let us come in and play when he was doing his work in the kitchen. So all the kids in the neighborhood would come play Atari at this drug dealer’s house. Not many of our parents knew he was a drug dealer because not many  of them did drugs. So we were sitting there having the best time while he was bagging and doing things in his kitchen, and he was like the most famous person I knew, right? Roy. 

One day, somebody comes and tries to rob Roy. Because, you know, my mom might not have known what was going on, but the people who bought drugs from him knew what was going on. And the guy came in, tried to rob Roy, and Roy shot him and killed him in the middle of our courtyard. And then he grabbed his stuff and ran out the back door and nobody ever saw him again. So we’re all sitting there like, “what just happened?” 

We called the cops, the cops never came to our neighborhood, and there were some dads around I guess and one came around and looked in the house and said, “looks like he’s not coming back,” and then everybody poured in and started taking Roy’s stuff. Somebody took the Atari, somebody else took the controllers, another person got the cartridges. Then dads went in to get this projection screen TV and they lifted it up, four or five of them, and brought it out into the courtyard. That’s when the cops showed up. They hadn’t been in our neighborhood in like a year, and then they showed up. Everybody scattered. The TV wobbled for a second then boom, just fell down in the middle of the courtyard. And it sat out there for like a week, and it got rained on, people were sitting playing cards on it.  It just sat there forever until somebody finally came and took it away. And that was sort of the end of the celebrity for me when I was a kid. I was walking by the TV thinking, “It was so fun to play Atari on it.” I had no idea it was going to  follow me around for the rest of my life. 

So in the context of that, I don’t know if I looked at the stars in that same way—the actual stars in the sky—but what I did look at them as was a way to escape. Because that’s really far away from an area where the richest person is a drug dealer. I mean, I’ve gotten pretty far away from that now, too, but at the time it just seemed incomprehensible. And the thing that people don’t understand about being poor is that everybody around you is poor, too. It’s not like we’re walking around wishing we had more, because nobody has anything. Or at least that’s what it was like back then. Now, it’s on TV right in front of you.

Last night I read that poem where all the rich people went to their islands and posted on IG about it and the rest of us were just kind of sitting around. Nowadays someone poor could see that and understand what they are missing. But when I was a kid when there wasn’t the internet and there wasn’t cable, you wouldn’t see that.  You’d just see the people around you, so it was more of a terrarium of want. Everything was kind of local until it wasn’t. There was no in between. I didn’t think about trying to get to the suburbs. It was “I’m here.” Or “I’m way out there.” And if I’m out there, I don’t have to worry about the things I have to worry about here. They were just markers for a kind of success that was impossible. 

GER: One of your poems in Somebody Else Sold the World toys with the term and the idea of excuses. By using excuses so often it defamiliarizes the word to the reader in a really fascinating way. I started to read it into other parts of the poem. Was this the intent of the piece, to force readers to give up additional excuses? What does that mean to you?

AM: You know, when you’re writing a poem, and you’re like, “alright, I think I’m trying to do something that I don’t ordinarily do with form or with language use?”  That was one of the ones. I don’t really like poems that don’t have punctuation, and so when I started to write a poem that doesn’t have punctuation and that thinks about the word “excuses” as punctuation, it was a different process for me. The main thing was that I wanted that word to be so woven into the fabric of the poem that you can’t forget what the word means. Because that’s how it was played to us. I mean, the number of excuses that were made just to not help each other was mind boggling to me. I was thinking about my neighborhood in Indianapolis—and it was a neighborhood in transition—that’s what they call it generally, downtown and in the city. And when Covid hit, most of them just boarded up and wouldn’t deal with anybody, but there were a few of them that were like, “We have elderly people on our street. Let’s make sure that they’re okay.” 

My wife was one of those people who would go and check, and try to make grocery runs and things like that for the elderly folks. The number of excuses that the other neighbors came up with to not do the smallest thing…all it was was, “Hey, do you need something?” And then go to the grocery store and then leave it on the porch for them. That was it. The small act of kindness that was central to the people who couldn’t get it themselves, couldn’t afford DoorDash. It meant a lot to them to do this small little thing. And how irregularly people would engage with these small acts that helped people survive. And the real questions were: “What are you going to do with yourself when this is over? Are you going to see who you really are, who you were in this moment when you had the opportunity to help someone while you were at the grocery store?” You could just pick up a couple of things for them. You’re healthy enough, you’ve got a mask, you’re able to go in there. You could do this for this person who is seventy-something, who has no family, they need this help. But instead they chose not to. Instead, they chose to hoard resources for themselves, because at a certain point being able to move through the world became a resource. Being able to go to the store, to go to the pharmacy without fear of what would happen to you, that was a resource. And they kept it for themselves, instead of sharing that with people who didn’t have that. 

I wanted to hold them accountable, and I wanted to hold the former administration accountable, whose whole position was, “Whatever guys, good luck. It’s just like the flu. Maybe if you use Windex it would help.” All of it was an excuse to not be more caring and more considerate of the people around them. I mean, I failed many times during that, but I also hoped that I succeeded. I hope I was helpful to some people. But it was a free-for-all. In real time, seeing the selfishness that’s baked into the United States, that’s baked into capitalism, and baked into this national ethos of “I’m getting mine.” 

And it goes back to The Big Smoke, because that’s kind of how Jack Johnson was. He was like, “I’m getting mine. I’m not trying to uplift the entire Black race, I’m uplifting me.” And that’s the most American principle, and it's harmful. I promised my wife that once I was done at Poetry Foundation and I was looking for a job, I would look outside the United States. It’s not because I don’t love being here. It’s not that. It’s, “What if there’s another way? What if there’s a different way to be in the world that’s a bit more caring?” I’m clearly not making that happen around me, so where else might this be enacted in a way that might be useful? Where else could I be where people don’t have to bankrupt themselves because they need health care? That happened a lot inside of Covid, too. All of these cracks in the social fabric in the U.S. became completely legible in that year and a half, two years. And that’s still going on. I’m not wearing a mask right now, but as soon as I go to the airport I’m going to have one on again. Oftentimes, at readings I won’t wear one, but if it’s a big enough crowd I’ll have one on, not because I haven’t gotten vaccinated, I’ve got all of that, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still going on. There are people who need me to take precautions so that I don’t bring something back to them. It’s not about me, it's about the people I interact with who need that protection. But that doesn’t make me special. A lot of people do it, and have made concessions in their lives to care for the people around them. It’s like a willful socialism—I’m making a choice with my help to be a socialist. 

BR: You briefly touched on this earlier, but you’ve been the editor of Poetry magazine for a year now— how do you think your work with a literary magazine with such a long poetic history affects your writing both from an editorial and creative standpoint?

AM: We talked a little bit about how much disruption it's caused in my writing process, but I think I walked into it thinking about how much I was going to learn as an editor, and that would eventually come back and help my writing. All of the reading I’m doing, all of the learning I’m doing of the trends, eventually, it’s going to filter in, and it's going to help my writing. I think when they approached me for the job, one of the big reasons they asked me was they wanted a practicing writer who also had editorial experience. I was the editor for a magazine called Callaloo for a while before, and a contributing editor to a number of magazines over the years. Being a practicing writer was important for this job because other poets know I understand what they’re doing. Editors understand, but they understand in a different way than a practitioner. Which is kind of ironic because I’m becoming someone who is just an editor. But it’s temporary. Poems aren’t going away, I’m not going away from them, either.

I imagined it like going back to school, like I was going to go get my PhD as the editor of Poetry because it's a five-year thing. When I come out of that, I’m sure that I’m going to have a lot to say in verse. The fundamental fact is that the history of the magazine—with the exception of Harriet Monroe who founded it and is also the only woman lead editor of this magazine in 110 years—looks a lot like the wall of U.S. presidents. It's a series of white men, and then there’s me. On the bookends of this, you’ve got Harriet Monroe and her visionary idea for poetics, a bunch of white dudes, and then me.. And that’s fine, in a lot of ways it reflects American poetry during that time and some of the editors did incredible work to amplify voices. But I knew if I was given this opportunity, even if it was disruptive to me, that I needed to take it. Not necessarily because I was the right person for it, but I knew that if I was given the opportunity, I would kick the door open. That’s what I did as a Poet Laureate of Indiana, I held the door open for everybody coming in. I tried to do it at the university, held the door until they made me close it, and in this case I’m the Editor so they can’t make me close it. 

So, October 2022 was my first issue. Since October, about 65% of the poets who we’ve published are first time poets in the magazine. More than 75% of the poets are from marginalized communities. But the choices are not for the demographic, they are for best poems. And we’re not curating or dealing with them in a way that’s nepotistic. My idea is to institutionalize this to such a degree that whoever comes after me, no matter what their attitude is, they won’t be able to pull it back. They won’t be able to go back to the old days where, “my friends are giving me poems, and we’re publishing the same two or three people in every issue.” I want opportunity to be part of the fabric of the magazine. 

The magazine looks completely different now than when I did when we took over. But changes had already been happening when I got there. I’m building on momentum that was already there. It's 110 years, 110 years of publishing brilliant poets but also excluding so many wonderful poets, movements, and perspectives. For every time that a poem like Gwendolyn Brooks “We Real Cool” is in the magazine, a whole bunch of other brilliant Gwendolyn Brooks poems weren’t. They published other white poets over and over for decades, but Gwendolyn Brooks showed up twice. 

GER: Speaking more about your journey as an editor, we’re all editors for The Interlochen Review—what was that journey like, from climbing up the ladder in editorial experience? 

AM: I’m so glad you all are doing this. It gives you a different perspective as writers. It’s good to see other writers’ work, and there’s joy in making choices, and curating a vision inside of it. There’s also the sadness of having to tell somebody no. I remember somebody telling me, “if you do it enough, you’ll get used to it,” but it’s been the opposite. There have been times where I’ve taken poems that I maybe wasn’t as excited about because I was excited about that poet's trajectory. Not here at Poetry, but at previous magazines, where I felt like the support was important at that moment. It’s one of the great opportunities editors have to create opportunity.there are all these different kinds of things that you can do as an editor to make space and lift up voices that maybe haven’t been seen. To take a chance on energetic poems where the seams are visible, that maybe weren’t as polished as some other poems, but you can imagine the poet is going to be doing even more.”

My boss once asked me, “Well, what does this job mean to you? Your trajectory? Your career?” And to be honest, I really hadn’t thought about it. I felt like I needed to do it when it was offered to me, but I didn’t have any ambitions to come back to editing. My experience at Callaloo was so insightful and informative, but it convinced me that I didn’t want to be a full-time editor. That was 2005. Since 2005, I was like, “I’m good. I like editing so I’ll do this guest issue. But to stop doing what I’ve been doing to go edit full time? I’ll pass.” It took Poetry, the oldest poetry magazine in the world saying, “Hey, why don’t you come and figure this out with us,” to bring me back.

I love editing, I love helping other writers on the line level. But I know what it asks of you, what it takes. Even as the work creates all of these opportunities, so many opportunities to spotlight new voices and to give poets the kind of shine that they deserve. The April Issue 2023 issue, which featured the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, was one of my great joys. Seeing this group of long-established poets whose work has been so influential for all of us, getting celebrations and checks. It matters. It matters to be seen, but also to directly and effectively support people. Poets need to eat. That’s the other part of this work that means a lot. We’re trying to figure out how to pay people more. We’re trying to figure out how to make those checks to poets just a little bigger. Every little bit helps. 

RE: Do you have any projects underway that you’re excited about? What are you working on next? I know we briefly touched on your next graphic novel.

AM: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I’ve been working on some essays. Not because I wanted to, but because I said I would. I have to keep working on this essay about persona poetry and the rapper of DOOM. He used to wear a Dr. Doom mask and had all these different personas. It’s for this monograph that four years ago I said I would do, I was really excited then, but now I’m struggling a little bit to finish it. I’m at 3,500 words, but it has to be 6,000, so in the next week and a half, I have to come up with the rest. As poets, we all know that concision is key. So somehow I’ve got to figure out how to build it out with something that’s useful to DOOM’s conversation, not just me talking because he’s my favorite emcee. Maybe that’s the difference between poetry and essays: when poets are done, we’re done. We don’t keep talking just to fill a page count or a word count. A poem is finished because it has said everything it needs to say.