Archive for August 2018
Indiana’s poet laureate writes his truths
Adrian Matejka discovered his vocation as a poet in a roundabout way. His first love was not literature, but rap music, a creative calling that he soon determined was not meant to be.
“I was a terrible emcee, so I gave it up and decided to be a stockbroker,” he said. But during his second year in college, he heard American poet Yusef Komunyakaa reading in a coffee shop and felt compelled to try his hand at writing verse.
Despite abandoning his early dreams of musical stardom, Matejka (pronounced Mah-TEE-kuh) still finds inspiration in rap, which he describes as “the most popular example of poetry we have.”
“Rappers use the same language devices – rhyme, simile, metaphor, allusion – as poets. The big difference … is the goal of the language. Rappers are trying to team up with music in order to evoke emotion, tell stories or get the party going. Poets are teaming up with the reader’s imagination to do those same things.”
Musical and other pop culture references are among the means by which Matejka provides readers a non-intimidating entry into his work, with the goal of creating poems that “offer up stories and circumstances that I hope will be both familiar and surprising to the reader.”
The accessibility of Matejka’s work was perhaps one of the contributing factors to his appointment as the new poet laureate of Indiana by the Indiana Arts Commission. He began his two-year tenure on January 1, and will continue serving through December 31, 2019.
His published poetry collections include The Devil’s Garden (2003), Mixology (2009) and The Big Smoke (2013), the latter of which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and 2014 Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, Map to the Stars (2017), explores growing up in Indianapolis in the 1980s.
Matejka was born into an American military family in Germany, but settled in Indianapolis in 1980. After graduating from Indiana University Bloomington, he left the state for nearly 20 years to live in Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis and elsewhere before returning to Bloomington in 2012 to take up his current position as poet-in-residence at Indiana University.
“I rarely wrote poems that were influenced by geography before Map to the Stars. When I came back to Indiana [in 2012], I was struck by how little the place has changed cosmetically but how completely different the climate and culture is now,” he said. “So growing up in Indianapolis didn’t influence writing the poems as much as coming back did. I was able to think about my experiences here in the 1980s a little differently after being gone so long.”
Matejka’s other preoccupations as a poet include race, economics, family and masculinity.
“The racial conflicts in our country have been exacerbated by the current politics of ignorance and bluster, but all of this bigotry was here before. It just has a bigger megaphone in 2018,” he said, adding that while poetry “can’t change legislation, reduce gun violence or right electoral maleficence,” it can offer a way to speak out against oppression like sexism and racism.
“Poetry is a great enabler of voices,” he said. “The art has empowered many people who were previously disenfranchised, silenced or otherwise ignored in the larger public discourse. Poetry has the power to amplify the natural voice of protest, which I hope is happening in some of my work.”
He said one of his obligations as poet laureate is to remind people that poetry is vital and that anyone is “welcome to join us, as creators or listeners of poems in whatever way they would like.”
“Poetry can sometimes be intimidating because it has its own agenda for music and creativity, and it can feel like a party we’ve crashed without an invitation. At the same time, poetry often uses traditional English building blocks – words, syntax, allusions, even punctuation – that are familiar to many of us.”
Matejka also hopes to emphasize poetry as one of the oldest forms of communication, a means by which people remembered history, entertained and shared political ideas long before there were novels, radios or movies.
“[Poetry] is our most essential public art and there is room in it for everyone. It’s cheap to create and easily available. Once people accept that there is no right or wrong in poetry and there are no secret handshakes or initiation rituals necessary to writing poetry, creation naturally follows,” he said. “If you write your truths, you can learn the rest as you go along.”
Read Adrian Matejka’s poetry here:
Portrait Photo: Stephen Sproll
Interview in brief: Al Stoller, Fort Wayne’s thrill-seeking wing-walker
For as long as he can remember, Al Stoller has been a thrill seeker. Growing up in Paulding County, Ohio, he was a member of the high school rocket club. After graduating from college and moving to Fort Wayne, he got into drag-racing cars – “legal and illegal” – before taking up skydiving, a pursuit that lasted until he broke his ankle. Next came aerobatic flying, and in 2013 Stoller attended an academy in Seattle, Washington, to learn how to wing-walk. Since then he’s been up more than 15 times, including performances at air shows. Last year, at age 71, he was featured in a Japanese documentary about seniors with unusual hobbies.
How would you describe the sensation of wing-walking?
The academy [in Seattle] teaches you all the specifics – the three points of contact, the propeller blast, where you can put your feet so you don’t step through the fabric wing. When you first climb out of the cockpit, you’re so overwhelmed, four of your five senses are on total overload. You’ve got adrenaline flowing through your body like you wouldn’t believe. It’s really, really hard to think because you’ve got so much going on that’s never happened before in your life. So you’ve got to develop muscle memory so you don’t even have to think about where to put your hands or where to grab onto.
What happens once you’re up in the air?
You climb up to 3,000 feet. It’s an open-cockpit biplane with a 450-horsepower rotary engine. I’m in the front cockpit; the pilot always flies in the back. You climb onto the top wing, and you’ve got to maneuver your way through some wires and then strap a belt on because there’s nothing to hold onto. You’re just standing there. Then you do loops and rolls. Then the pilot levels out. You get back down in the cockpit, and then climb out between the two wings and do the same aerobatics over again. I’ve got the point where I just stand up and the air pressure, the wind, holds me against the two cables. That way I can give thumbs up and wave to the crowd. The whole flight takes about 30 minutes, and the actual wing-walking is about 15 or 20 minutes.
Do you ever feel scared when you’re up there?
Your senses and instincts tell you to be afraid, but the thrill seeker inside of you says, “Nah, go for it.” I would say 75 percent of the people that do go up, if they hadn’t committed so much money and time, they would never climb out of the cockpit. The 25 percent of the thrill seekers just can’t wait to do it, but their senses still tell them, “You shouldn’t be doing this, you should be afraid,” but you just throw that aside and go for it.
Photo: Patrick Downs
Late for Nowhere 