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- [00:00]
A
This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com that's o d o o.com taking care of your eyes shouldn't be a hassle. That's why Warby Parker is a one stop shop for all your vision needs. Our prescription glasses and sunglasses are expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Stop by a nearby store or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. Did we mention we offer eye exams and take vision insurance too? For everything you need to see, head to your nearest Warby Parker store or visit warbyparker.com today. That's warbyparker.com.
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B
Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine today. My guest is Adrian Mateja. He's the author of seven poetry collections and the graphic novel Last on His Feet. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, served as the Poet Laureate of the State of Indiana from 2018 to 2019, and is editor in Chief of Poetry Magazine. He lives in Chicago. Adrian, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
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C
Oh, it's so good to see you, Kevin. Thanks for having me on. I'm a big fan of the podcast.
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B
Oh, well, thanks. I'm really excited to hear the first poem you've chosen to read, which is against the encroaching grays by C.D. wright. What was it about this particular poem that attracted you?
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C
You know, first of all, it's a beautiful poem, but I'm absolutely fascinated by CD Wright as a poet. You know, I mean, we, I think when we talk about Southern poets, there's a kind of expectation of subject matter or a shape of poem, even though that's not really true. It's just kind of a 20th century idea, you know. But she sort of expanded all of that for me. She was somehow simple and ornate at the same time. I mean, she actually said something like that about herself. She said that she she said, I'm plain and sophisticated at the same time. And I thought that that was a really interesting way to think, not only about being a poet, but being a person, you know? So when I was going through all the amazing poems you all have selected over the past few years, and I saw this one, I was like, I want to. I want to talk with Kevin about CD Wright.
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B
Exciting. Why don't we hear the poem? Here's Adrian Matejka reading Against the encroaching grays by C.D. wright.
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C
Against the encroaching grays I held up the femur of a grasshopper. Some blue air fell over me. What I want is less clear to me now than it was then. To be loved to the end without Ruth or recrimination. To forgive myself as others have forgiven me. To enjoy the birds with little bones at the farmer's market. I still see his truck from time to time. Notices on utility poles for a lost dog answering to Scout. Sometimes I sit in a cafe pretending to read, but knowing I want to be the one to find Scout. Instead, I do what I have done. I wake up enjoying the struggle of the trees to find a way through. And then the dark clot of poetry breaks off.
- [03:52]
B
That was against the encroaching grays by C.D. wright, which was originally published in the March 24, 2025 issue of the New Yorker. I loved hearing that reading because I don't think I'd heard it aloud before, though I can definitely hear Sidi's voice. I love the sense of time in the poem. What I want is less clear to me now than it was then. There's this kind of assumption that we know what either of those times. But there's a sense of time, of course, starting with the title against the Encroaching Grays. How did you hear the title? And also this idea of now and then Time in the poem.
- [04:30]
C
Yeah, the title is such. It's so lovely in the way that it evokes aging and thinking about not only our own sort of time on the mortal coil, but the way that the things around us shift and that the way our priorities about the things around us shift. You know, like thinking about sitting in this cafe and writing, but really wanting to be the one that finds Scout, you know, like what we need to do versus maybe what we might want to be doing. And if that's not at the center of poetry, I'm not sure what is, you know? And there's something else about time in the poem that's maybe attached to the way that the poem is shaped. You know, there's no punctuation in it. It's mostly intersects, but not quite, you know, and these. There's the word instead in the middle of. It's a one word line. And so the way even reading it is like, okay, how did the cadence of it feel? Feels like somebody's slowing things down even as the rest of it's trying to speed us up.
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B
Is that how you hear the lack of punctuation as a slowing? Or is it like that tension between slowing and quickening?
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C
You know, for me, it slows it down because I can't figure out where I'm supposed to start and stop.
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B
I see a bit like the speaker, right?
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C
Yeah.
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B
Right.
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C
I mean, I think as a function of poetry, it's supposed to quicken it a little bit. Right. But for me, I kept. Because I'm a huge admirer of her syntax and the way that she just shapes things. I kept trying to figure out what was attached to what.
- [05:56]
B
Yes.
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C
Like, where does this instead go? You know, is it attached to the thing before it or the thing after? And so there's also a great deal of pleasure in trying to unpack the shapes of the sentences or the shapes of the lines in this poem. You know, when I was a professor, you know, I used to hate seeing one word lines, what are you doing?
- [06:18]
B
Yeah. Because it's usually like abyss or it's like some huge abstract concept. And the advantage of. Instead, it's a little how we speak, if not a lot. I want to be the one to find Scout instead. Or as you sort of point out, it could be, I want to be the one to find Scout instead. I do what I have done. And that kind of doubleness is of the way people talk. You know, it is much more spoken than the way people necessarily think, if we can make a distinction. And I think this captures both thinking and speaking and kind of this inner voice that this eye has that feels. Even when it's sounding kind of unsure or thinking through doubt, it feels very assured. And I love the way that CDs able to get that in this poem.
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C
Yeah. There's a bit of melancholy in it. Right. Because Scout's gone, You know, that I still see his truck from time to time. Like these moments where there is the simultaneity of past and present.
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B
Yes.
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C
For the speaker and for me, it really just takes off when she starts talking about this farmer's market. And I know some of that is personal.
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B
Right.
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C
Like, some of that is me having grown up in A place where farmer's markets were common, you know, so all of this is really familiar. I guess they're common everywhere now. But, you know, in the 1980s, we had farmers markets all the time. And I was surprised when I go places, places, and they didn't have them,
- [07:45]
B
you know, in Indiana, where you grew up.
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C
You mean, because it's Indiana, this is the kind of thing you do. Right. And so, like, the pickup truck and the flyers and all of those things evoked a past for me that I see that had a bit of nostalgia, but also it's so much more common now than it was then.
- [08:03]
B
I wonder if it's. It feels like the speaker is in the heart of a town, but also in the heart of sort of something that they can't quite express, though, of course, manage to along the way, even if it sort of, you know, it has this ending, is what I'm trying to say, that says, I do what I have done. I wake up and join the struggle. Which, you know, I love that line anyway. And, you know, there's a tradition where that struggle might be, you know, fight the power or whatever kind of struggle, but then it's also the struggle of the trees to find a way through. And, you know, that idea of almost spring, and it takes us back to that opening, you know, salvo of both the grasshopper and the encroaching grays and this kind of sense of time, but this sense of mortality. And I think that's so powerful there, that struggle of the trees to find a way through and then break. A dark clot of poetry breaks off. What do you make of this dark clot of poetry?
- [09:08]
C
Oh, I love it. I've never thought, you know, the first time I read this, I only was focused on the kind of meditations that we're talking about, because the first half of the poem is this kind of to be loved and to love others and be forgiven. You know, these kinds of asks that we start to make when we look back on things and realize the, you know, the implications of our actions, right? But then you get to the end and there's a dark clot of poetry. And I'd never heard of poetry described as a clot to begin with or anything clot like. But then I realized, wait a minute, this is an ars poetica, right? All of a sudden we've got a poem about a poem and about poetry and about the desire of this poet to see the world through that. And so, you know, I had a professor, Allison Joseph, when I was in Grad school. And she would just wander around and come back like, that's a poem. That's a poem. That's a poem. That tree over there, That's a poem.
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B
Yeah.
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C
You know, that car with the busted hubcap? That's a poem. She just sort of saw the world through this lens of poetry in a way that I never have. And this speaker to me does that too. Like she's thinking about these things and even a dark clot of something becomes a poem, right?
- [10:16]
B
Sure.
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C
For her.
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B
Well, I mean, it feels like it's sort of giving birth or after birth or something that's, you know, I think, primal and bodily. I also love that it's a poem, as you point out, about language. But it's sort of here in this clot of poetry where it takes us back to this femur of a grasshopper, which I think of as both sort of dead and also this idea of, you know, the grasshopper and the ant. Is it the ant and the grasshopper? Yeah, clearly I'm a grasshopper. Cause I can't even remember what the ant did, you know. But like this idea of socking away for winter as opposed to playing, or this idea of surviving to spring, which of course is in poetic terms, I think, also a metaphor for life and death and renewal. And maybe that's what I see in the end. And that's what I love about that. It doesn't feel like losing a limb or something. It feels more like the beginning or beginning again.
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C
Yeah. Like, you know, there's something really magical about that. Like the renewal that might be in that space. Even as this person is. The speaker is cataloging so many other things that have gone by.
- [11:30]
B
Well, I love how you point out to us to be loved to the end without Ruth or recrimination. This idea of Ruth or recrimination, that's what I. It just gets me because Ruth is one of those great words you never hear people use. They usually hear it in the opposite, ruthless. And you know, this idea of, you know, Ruth has this idea of grief or sympathy or understanding. You know, I loved it so much. I called a poem that once, you know, because to me that idea of ruthless is. It's the fact that we only know it's opposite almost shows you how little sympathy and grief and mourning we have. We only have the opposite. And yet here it is for her. And it sounds exactly right. Even if we might not see it that often without Ruth or recrimination, which are also opposites. You might think they're not. They're not without ruthlessness or something. So how did you take that sort of sense of language in the poem? Not just there, but throughout.
- [12:30]
C
You know, that goes back to that Southernness. To me, I think sometimes I conflate, like, a Southern kind of, like, language system with something that's a little bit more biblical. You know, as someone who spent quite a bit of time in Atlanta, which is like, not exactly the paragon on the south, but. And certainly not Arkansas, where CD Wright is from. But, yeah, there's something about that language where it always felt like there was more space for a more kind of biblical rendition of English.
- [12:59]
B
To me, recrimination is certainly up there.
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C
They sound preacherly to me in this really great way. I love that when you think about what that person is supposed to do up in the pulpit, they're supposed to. They're not only spreading the word, but they're also enacting it in a kind of way for the people who are listening to them. And recrimination 100% sounds like what it is.
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B
Yeah, that's true. And Ruth is that soothing word. I love scout, too. I mean, I think all poems should have dogs, certainly, if they can, but certainly they do. Well, dog poems, as, you know. But it's more here, you know, this lost figure, which of course has this great name, which for me counters, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird. But also kind of this idea of being a scout and looking out and, you know, that is what the speaker in some way is. The poet, as you point out, is thinking about scouting and looking around, but also. Also bringing back this information as a scout does.
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C
Yeah, it's so fabulous to hear you talk about it that way. I just wrote something about To Kill a Mockingbird, and it was in my editor's note. I was writing about people who had one big thing. They had one really major work. And thinking about Harper Lee, thinking about Orson Welles, who had a long career, but nothing was like Citizen Kane. I've been Harper Lee's been a just
- [14:28]
B
cause of selected poems is coming. Is that why you're thinking about these things, man?
- [14:35]
C
Well, I know that you were such a curator of poems, so I know, you know, how complicated it is when you have to curate your own.
- [14:41]
B
Yeah, it's a whole thing. I want to get to that. But I do want to. You know, your saying that reminds me of Sidi's huge work, One Big Self. And this idea of creating out of, in this case, the voices of people and a lot of them being incarcerated. That's how the first of the poems appeared, along with photographs and that kind of powerful collaboration, let's call it. And her sense of language as something you overhear and record. And that. That leads to, you know, I think a very American, at least American poetry notion of the self as being this big, huge, open thing. How do you see that and how do you see that in this poem?
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C
Yeah, it sounds very Whitman esque, doesn't it? Like everything that we can hold in. Yeah. I mean, this poem feels to me like maybe an extension of that in some ways, because so much of this is cataloging and the language is. Even when we're talking about this language, it gets a little bit more to the roots of what it actually is versus vernacular. It's still conversational and it's still meant to be understood in a way where, you know, you find poems. I mean, we find poems in everyday speech. We find poems everywhere in that way we were talking about a little bit earlier. Earlier, but with this one in particular, the first half is almost as if the speaker is speaking to herself and going through these things. And then the second half becomes more like a poem because it's a catalog of things that the speaker is seeing. And so when we get to that bit about the little bones, what a great image to have. But right around that spot is when in the palm, like at the farmer's market, it starts to become a thing that is more versified, if that's the right verb for it.
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B
Is it versified or more public? Or maybe it's less nomic in a way, and it suddenly opens up to utility poles and a lost dog and different things of everyday life than things that in a way, feel private.
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C
I don't know.
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B
It's a good question. It goes kind of cinematically speaking, Orson Welles, from this kind of zoom up close, you know, there's not much smaller than the femur of a grasshopper to this. I would call it a big self there in the middle. And then for me, it kind of zooms back down. But I like what you're saying about this sort of peeling away and expanding at the same time that's happening.
- [17:16]
C
I think that's one of her great gifts as a poet. Regardless of the, you know, point of view or the subject matter, there always feels. Her poems always feel like they're excavating, but they also feel like they're here, but also on another planet somehow. There's something that always feels like it's about to. I'm about to lose hold of it in a really beautiful way, you know, And I make these hand gestures, like somebody can see me other than you. Right?
- [17:40]
B
Yeah, exactly. They're very nicely done.
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C
Just grabbing for this balloon or something, you know.
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B
But you're also talking about this grasping that happens. It's both a technique, and I don't mean that to mean it's so self conscious. It's a way she approaches. But also, it's also kind of what the poem's about. It's about reaching and yearning in ways that I think are really powerful.
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C
Yeah. Did you ever meet her?
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B
I mean, more than that. I studied with cd. Right.
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C
I did not know that.
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B
You didn't see. I was waiting to say that, yes. She was my teacher at Brown. I had her twice in workshop. And so her work was in the midst of kind of changing from some of those earlier poems to the later, bigger, let's call them more epic works. And so it was really a poignant moment to study with her and, you know, profound in that way. And it leads me to ask you actually about. You know, for me, I have a sort of personal relationship to this because both of my. Well, nearly all of the people who I studied with or worked for at Brown are no longer with us. Michael Harper, Keith Waldrop and cd. And I wonder about how you heard this poem in terms of, you know, we published it posthumously. How did you did that? Was that part of it? I mean, it's hard not to be with a title like against the Encroaching Grays. But I wonder how you hear that sort of influential, posthumous, you know, but, like, here's the last. Not the last, but some of her last utterances for us. How did it change for you, hearing it?
- [19:20]
C
Yeah. An additional melancholy to it for me. And I don't know if you share this, but I'm really sensitive about the bodies of work that people leave us. And that if I know there's not gonna be any more, then I wanna really just kind of like parse it out. Like, I don't. Like I never finished the autobiography of Miles Davis because I know what happens in the end anyway. But there's like 30 pages that I'm still holding onto at some point to go back and read. Right. I wanna still have that opportunity to engage with the work, with the freshness that it's always had for me, even though there won't be any more. And so I think I'm a little bit precious about that kind of thing. Right. I don't want it to all be gone, you know, and of course I can Go back and reread all of these books. I can go back and reread all these poems, but you only read them once for the first time.
- [20:09]
B
You only read them once. I mean, read me for the first time. Okay, you saved that.
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C
Only read. You know, I love this, like, this idea that every once in a while get surprised. You know, we just. I know you all published some of these, too. Some of the poems from the Larry Levis book that nobody had seen was, what a surprise, you know?
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B
Yeah.
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C
I thought we had everything that we were gonna have.
- [20:35]
B
Absolutely. And I think in both those cases, there's so much more that emerges. And also, I think it shapes how we rethink some of the older work. Sometimes it's later work, sometimes you find an older piece. As you know, I love archives in that way. I would say that for me, I like having them. And I like also knowing that not only might there be more, but that also, there's always more within that poem. Those poems, that body of work, the archive itself changes over time because we change. And there's often things that people will say, for instance, oh, that Zora Neale Hurston book was lost in the archive. It's like, actually, it was saved by the archive and waiting for you. And, in fact, in many cases, the reason it wasn't, say, published before is because. And I'm thinking more of Hurston than CD Wright weren't quite ready yet to hear what it had to say. And, you know, that happens so often that I start to think not in the magic of archives, you know, but in the way that they hold always a potential and always are changing and evolving there for us. And I can't imagine now CD without this poem. But there was a time when we didn't have it, but now it's sort of changed not just how I hear this poem, but the stuff we already had. And so, I don't know, for me, it makes me revisit, it makes me rethink and return. And this poem is so much about that, in a way, even as it's resisting these approaching grays. Yeah. Oh, encroaching.
- [22:08]
C
I love that framing of it. There's something. It's deepening. We both worked on projects about Jack Johnson, and I think we'd see that kind of thing. And, you know, this Boxer's history. There were all these different pieces that kept. Some of it was available before. Some of it got declassified at one point. Like, there were just so many. Yeah, yeah. So many things. And each time something new would show Up. You're right. It just. It changed the narrative across this person's life. You know, it's a really, really beautiful way to think about it.
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B
Well, and I think it's here in this poem where she says, you know, sometimes I sit in a cafe pretending we could stop right there. You know, that's the poet's fate. Sometimes I sit in a cafe pretending to read, but knowing I want to be the one to find Scout instead. And even that idea in a cafe, pretending to read but knowing. And, you know, reading and knowing, pretending, finding. These are all the sort of verbs that come forth for me. And they're very much, as you point out, the heart of her notion of what a writer does. And I think having it here and having her say it so beautifully, it's so great to get to talk with you about it.
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C
Oh, thank you for publishing this. The whole book is magical. I know I keep using that word, but I feel like that that's what it is. Like, how did you do that? How did you make that turn at the end of this poem from instead and leave us with this hanging image? You know, poetry breaking off like that. That's just such. It doesn't matter how many poems I've read, every once in a while you find something that's just inexplicable to me in the best way. Like, you know, I would have loved to have been able to ask, you know, I know this is a rude question, Professor Wright, but can you walk me through the last third of this poem? Like, just how did you get there? You know, how did you do that? Because I got there with you. But as a writer, I'm just really fascinated by the. That these. These images stack up on themselves and leave us there.
- [24:21]
B
Beautifully said. Or from my conversation with Adrian Matejka after the break.
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C
Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothee Chalamet and Teyana Taylor aren't the only major nominees. The New Yorker will be there too, with two nominated short films, which you can watch@newyorker.com video. Two people exchanging saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabel Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short films@newyorker.com video.
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A
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B
Adrian, welcome back.
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C
Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for making the space.
- [27:13]
B
Now, in our December 15, 2025 issue, the new Yorker published your poem Almost Home, which you'll read for us in a moment. Is there anything you'd like our listeners to know before they hear you reading it?
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C
You know, I if they do not know who Bob Kaufman is, I would really like to talk a little bit about that just in case, please.
- [27:34]
B
Yes.
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C
Because he's just such a, I think, fascinating and wonderful poet. And so Bob Kaufman was, I guess, part of the Beat generation of poets.
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B
That's right. I mean, some people say that he invented the term Beat, that he was the one who dubbed the movement that and certainly dubbed himself that. And in his life and everything, he very much embodied certainly the Beats.
- [28:02]
C
Oh, I think he embodied what they wished that they could be. Right?
- [28:06]
B
Sure.
- [28:07]
C
I think that's what I'm struggling with is I think of him, I think of Leroy Jones as one part of this. And it's not Just because there's two black men. But then I think about the way they approach the work, the sonic sensibility of it, the embodiment of the kind of politics in it that I'm not sure that the rest of the crowd was privy to, except for maybe Ginsburg. You know, Allen Ginsberg so well, I
- [28:34]
B
think knowing that he was born in New Orleans and Bob Kaufman and then spent most of it was in the merchant Marines, which having done some deep dives recently on the beats, wasn't an uncommon thing. Kerouac did much the same during World War II. But getting back to San Francisco, where he ended up. And this poem is very much about he lived in north beach and there's a street name for him there now. But he, during his life took a vow of silence, it was said, between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the end of the Vietnam War, which is a good while.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And certainly I am always obsessed. And we've talked before, we can talk more, talking about Velkofmann all the time. But you know, his influence is so interesting and I think on, you know, the Dark Room Collective, which I was in. You know, he was one of our north stars. So it was great to see this poem from you about him. Maybe we can hear it and we can talk more about him and your version of him. Here's Adrian Matejka reading his poem Almost Home.
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C
Almost Home. We know some things, man bout some things, Bob Kaufman said, strutting down another San Francisco street on his way from there to where whatever's here. His pockets were turned out to their linty parts like a magician's mid trick. He had a dull pencil tucked between his ear and his preternatural afro. I followed up roller coaster hills past misbegotten alley kisses hummingbirds everywhere hitchhiked thumbing California's daylight. Bob Kaufman loved San Francisco's gentle malaise. Long views of bay and Sistent Bridge, the ocean right after I'm from Indiana, where dirt roads lead to other dirt roads that always lead to fields of blondly tasseled stocks wafted by local infidelities. When the wind kicks up, crops stammer secrets recklessly as the gnats cloud and buggy doubts above those lazy farmers in repose just like the poets in San Francisco Shays lounging it in silk kimonos for their gorgeous sun slicked photos. Everyone stays skyward out here. Just then Bob Kaufman turned a corner in his own quick reverie and started up and down the coronary hills of a city everyone talks About. But nobody can afford to love. Not like my hometown of Indianapolis, where four skyscrapers stand affordably in the center of your wallet's imagination. They subsidize everybody's big ideas while the penthouse couple fishes for a third for their kinky party. There's even a cuck chair in their bedroom where the husband watches his wife being ravaged. Indy can be just as fantastic and horny as San Francisco or Paris at times. For a time, Bob Kaufman was the most famous poet in France, bigger than Verlaine or the pirate Rimbaud. But in San Francisco, during his ten years of silence, he was wrong eyed and woebegone. He stayed silent and alone, as if not naming the words ricocheting in his ears could sustain him while passersby side eyed him up and down his hobo couture street sleeping. All those paper bag manifestos.
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B
That was Almost Home by Adrian Mateja. Great hearing you read that. You know, it really comes to life and you bring Kauffman to life. But I think also yours is a portrait of a city, but also of your hometown, Indianapolis, as you say. And I'm so curious about that tension. And is it a tension between a glamorous city on the west coast and a great city in the center of the country, which I lived near when I was in iu. So tell me about sort of that tension.
- [32:21]
C
I think anybody who's from a medium sized city, especially a midwestern one, has some feelings about big, fancy, shiny cities. And actually I love San Francisco.
- [32:34]
B
Yeah, you don't want to get the San Francisco people on your tail right now. Yeah, I'm trying to save you, man. I'm trying to save you.
- [32:40]
C
No, it's a great place. And it's just I looked at taking a job there once and I was like, there's no way I can afford to do this. And I think that that was maybe seven or eight years ago. And it just sat with me that, well, no matter how lovely this is, if I want to do the things that I want to do, if I want teach and I want to write poems and I want to be an editor and all the rest go to
- [33:02]
B
the farmer's market, you got to have some scratch.
- [33:05]
C
It'd be really difficult for me to be able to do it out there. And so when I took a poll of all my friends who have lived, they all live in Oakland. I don't know anybody who lives in San Francisco, really. And so as I was puzzling through my feelings about Bob Kaufman, whose work was so influential on Me, I realized. I think I was reading the Golden Sardine, and I realized that he's. I mean, he's really a poet of place in this way that I hadn't read him before, maybe last summer. And the poems he was writing could only happen in San Francisco, and it could only happen in San Francisco at that time. And so, like, sort of the layers of that. What it means for our geographies to be, like, sort of so central to who we are. I think. I think there are a lot of regional poets. I think there are a lot of poets who, you know, the way that New York poets write about the trains there, as if everybody knows what they're talking about. Right. Like, it's a thing that everybody there understands. It's like it's part of the culture of being there. Chicago's got its own version of those things as well, Right? Sure. But for San Francisco, it's a very different thing because there are so many versions of it, it feels like, to me. And so Bob Kaufman's was just one of those.
- [34:20]
B
Well, I like how you describe the city. You call it its gentle malaise. And so it isn't simply like a static place. It's a place in this rendering that you say Bob Kaufman loved. But there's also a sense of doom or haunting or change for the worse. And then here, toward the middle, let's call it, of the poem, Bob Kaufman turned a corner in his own quick reverie and started up and down the coronary hills of a city everyone talks about. But nobody break can afford to love, not like my hometown. And I don't think you just mean affordability there. I think you also mean something about love. Right. I mean, you have this sort of funny menage a trois that happens right after, you know, tell me about this sort of sense of love. Is it tough love that you're expressing toward your hometown or how are we to. It's not a gentle malaise. It's something different.
- [35:20]
C
Yeah, yeah. Indianapolis is just built differently, right. I mean, just in the most basic sense, there really are only, like, four skyscrapers downtown. So as a space, what is offered and asked and offered again, is just very different from other cities. And I think that at one point, the mayor and the city council decided that they wanted Indianapolis to be a convention center city. So there are a ton of hotels or a ton of spaces to do that, things like that. But people don't live down there. Like, hardly anybody lives downtown. Everybody lives in the suburbs because it's not a thing. And, you know, Contrast that with Chicago or New York or D.C. where there are people who are always in the middle of things, doing it. And it creates a very different kind of attitude about. About art, about, you know, sustainability, about all the things that cities have to concern themselves with now. And Indianapolis is on it. They're trying to figure out their version of it. But it's just a different urban space. And what people don't know about my hometown is it's 30% black. And so you have this diverse city in the middle of a very red state. And that creates another tension that I don't feel here in Chicago. I didn't feel when I was in San Fran. I don't feel that in other cities outside of the Midwest and the South.
- [36:40]
B
So is this lurking behind the poem?
- [36:42]
C
Absolutely.
- [36:43]
B
I mean, because Kaufman was in a city that would have been more black than it is now. I mean, the Fillmore, where. Which was the largely black neighborhood, was kind of urban, renewed. A highway sent through it and really changed. So there's a kind of mournfulness in the poem. And I wonder about that tone of. Is that what links these two places? The sort of speaker. The eyes. Mournfulness. There's also a wryness. You know, I don't want to make it sound like it's only one thing. Cause it's very funny as a poem. And playful in a way that Kaufman was, too. But I'm so curious about that. Misbegotten alley kisses. And these kind of great phrases that I think keep us guessing, but also keep us thinking about the ways that these things are always evolving.
- [37:35]
C
Yeah. I love that you talked a bit about Bob Kaufman and his political stances when we first started. Right. Because I think some of this is. I always felt like his poetry was, you know, said he's a poet of place, but he's also a poet, a witness, in a way. And so when I was trying to frame, like, my version of him and my understanding of his work and his relationship with a city, I really tried to build out a poem that was like him walking down the street and seeing things.
- [38:06]
B
Yes.
- [38:06]
C
It's not that far away from CD Wright. Sitting speaker, sitting in the coffee shop, looking at these different things. Right, right. Just imagining what he would have been seeing if he was here.
- [38:18]
B
Well, I think there's another way to put it. He's kind of a poet of exile. He's a poet of. Even when he's there, he's a silent poet. This kind of contradiction in terms. And we mentioned his sounds before, but I love how you talk about it here, but in San Francisco, during his ten years of silence, he was wrong eyed and woebegone. He stayed silent and alone, as if not naming the words ricocheting in his ears. There's a lot happening there that, you know, because we've gotten used to this kind of walking pace, can almost speed by. But how do you see him by the end? He's wrong on and Wobegon, he's silent and alone. He has hobo couture, but he also has paper bag manifestos, which are both powerful, but also. Are they smaller than they should be? You know, how do you hear that ending? Now, if you can think about, you
- [39:15]
C
know, when I was trying to find a place to land a conversation about Bob Kaufman, which is so much bigger than poem. It's bigger than, you know, he's got an enormous body of his own work. It goes. It extends beyond that because as you pointed out, so many of us were inspired and influenced by the things that he was doing. It made more sense to end having him not say anything at all. And he starts. We start with him talking.
- [39:43]
B
Right.
- [39:43]
C
You know, but by the end, there's nothing else really to say. And, you know, the fact that he was often unhoused, the fact that he had, you know, really struggled with, you know, mental wellness and things like that while he was doing this work. There wasn't a way for me to frame all of that without distracting from the fact that I wanted this to be a thing about Bob Kaufman in San Francisco and, like, a celebration of. And so there were versions of this ending where it got really heavy. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, that's not it. He can be quiet. He can be in his period of silence at the end of this. But even that was him speaking out against things.
- [40:23]
B
Yes, that's right. I mean, that's what I think. He's silent, but he's not quiet, if that makes sense.
- [40:29]
C
Yeah.
- [40:30]
B
Well, I want to return to both the form and the title of the poem. You know, it's one long stanza. And is that something you're drawn to a lot. And what are its advantages and what are its, you know, the things that don't happen?
- [40:43]
C
Yeah. You know, I don't often write like this, or I didn't. I have been lately because I think things are piling up nice, you know, and
- [40:54]
B
I'm gonna take that. You mean your work, but looking out the window. You're probably also right about the world at this moment. But tell me more about that. Things are piling up in your work here. And so this form seems to be something you're circling.
- [41:08]
C
Yeah, I think so, in part because it allows for a different kind of sonic play. So when I, you know, I love tercets, I love that they sort of move like a. A story with a beginning and a middle and an end in each one. You know, I'm really interested in that. But the more separation you use, if you use couplets or any kind of form like that, you're putting a lot of space between the words, which is putting space between the sounds. And so, you know, I'm looking at. At that section that you were just reading. The blondly tasseled stocks wafted by local infidelities. And if I start pulling that apart, these off rhymes and these, like, literary, like, assonance and consonants that I'm trying to, like, build out gets stalled. And so part of it is the relentlessness of the walk in this poem. But part of this is also the relentlessness, or my desire for a kind of relentless music, like the music of the city, like this sort of metronome happening. And the form allowed me to play that way.
- [42:11]
B
I love that. And I think here, you know, you were describing it in the sort of negative it would be if you didn't do that, like, separated. But I think it's also a poetry of connection. You're seeking connection with Kaufman between these two great cities, San Francisco and Indianapolis, but also the country and the city, the self and the other. You know, even the throuple in the bedroom, you know, there's this kind of connection, but also kind of observing of. Of connection. Like that kind of part of the poem is sort of about distance as well. So by writing through this form full of connection, I think it also lets you think about distance in ways that are interesting.
- [42:56]
C
Yeah. Thank you for saying that.
- [42:57]
B
Absolutely. I wanted to end by asking you about. We talked about it a little bit at the top, but what's it like to put together a selected poems. Your selected poems. It's called Be Easy New and Selected Poems, and it'll be out in March. Tell me about what that process was, because this is one of the new poems, obviously.
- [43:18]
C
Yeah.
- [43:18]
B
And going back, did you see. Speaking of connection, connections between all of the books, did you see leaps? Did you see changes? Were there some that you were like, I'm putting a little less from that volume, or was it a chance to reframe and rethink? All are possible, I think, and maybe all can happen at the same time.
- [43:38]
C
Yeah. You know, it was really. It was much more difficult than I expected, even with the help of a wonderful editor. You know, in part because I'm looking at my first book, came out in 2003. I mean, there are poems, and I know you can relate to this. There are poems that I was writing in my 20s, and it's just like, well, I don't even know that guy. Like, I don't even know who he is. I don't even know what his problem was. What was he trying to solve for with these half sonnets that he was writing? Like, it's so far, so long ago that it was hard for me to even remember the catalysts for the poems. And so. And certainly there were a lot of poems where I was like, ooh, yeah, I probably should have made a different craft choice right there. But there are other ones where I could see myself, especially in mixology, in the book that you picked, I could see myself trying to figure out how to do the thing that I'm doing now. Like, all the way back. I could say, oh, I'm trying to figure out how to string these things together. I just don't understand yet. And I think the idea of how vocabulary work evolved across the books as well. Like, for a long time, I didn't want to use my full vocabulary in a poem. Cause I didn't want it to sound like a written object. I wanted it to sound like something that someone had said, you know, and it's on point. I was like, yeah, but I like how these big words sound.
- [44:52]
B
Recrimination, as you said. You know, I like how that preternatural afro. I love that. I mean, you know, I mean, these are great words for a reason, as you say.
- [45:03]
C
Yeah. And, you know, there's just. I think maybe it took me a while to feel comfortable in that poetic skin, which, even though many of my poetry heroes were already there, it just didn't feel natural for me. And so going through those volumes, one of the things we decided at the front end is, I don't know if you do this, but I mark up my reading copies. When I'm going to read a poem, I'll just mark it up in the book. And so I had pages of poems that I'd read over the years where I'd revised them and changed them in different ways. And we decided to use those. Those.
- [45:37]
B
Wow. I almost asked you that because that's a very Galway Canal thing today. He couldn't stop revising even published poems, even beloved poems you'd take out Lines that people loved. And were you all the way doing that? I mean, were you. You were fine with that?
- [45:53]
C
Yeah. You know, so there was a point where I stopped myself after a point because I mostly just stopped reading those poems. Right. But yeah, I think there are. I still every once in a while change things in Maps of the Stars. So my fourth book, I still change things in Somebody Else Sold the world because those two are maybe from the last 10 years. I marked it up like crazy back then.
- [46:16]
B
Wow, that's so interesting.
- [46:18]
C
And you know, I actually picked this up, this habit up from Yusef Komunyaka because it's what he does. But he would have in his writing, his reading copy, like all these revisions in blue pen that signify one day and then revisions and read over on top of them from another day. And so I was like, oh, it said to me that you're allowed to treat a poem like a living document. It doesn't have to be a thing that's enshrined the minute it hits a book.
- [46:44]
B
I love that it really speaks to, as you say, the poem is always in process. It's a jazz approach to me. It's not just thinking of it as improving it. It's also like this is the version that today's me would have. It says something to me about your process that you hinted at too, of trying to sort of change and grow and see that as a continual process rather than a one time thing. Is that how you think about not just revision, but sort of writing?
- [47:20]
C
Yeah, I mean, I feel that almost everything that I've done is getting me ready for the next thing thing. And I wouldn't have been able to write this Bob Kaufman poem if I hadn't written a poem about Travis Scott in my last book. I wouldn't have been able to write that poem if I hadn't worked on poems about Jack Johnson. I mean, I think each of these things bequeaths something to the next one. And so at some point I have the feeling that I'll finally write the poem I'm trying to figure out. And when I do, I hope it's now for a long time. Because when I do then I going to kind of probably be done with this. Because you know, if I got there, if I was able to finally write the poem that I've been imagining Since I was 16 or 17, then what else is there for me in that, you know? And I'm nowhere close now. But I hope that at some point it might be, you know, 20 years from now.
- [48:17]
B
Thank you Adrian so much for talking with me today.
- [48:20]
C
Thank you Kevin. It's so good to see you man.
- [48:24]
B
Almost Home by Adrian Mateja as well as CD Wright's against the Encroaching Grays can be found on newyorker.com the Essential CD Right was published in May of 2025. Adrian Matejka's forthcoming book Be New and Selected Poems will be published on March 31st of this year.
- [48:46]
C
To listen to new poetry from the New Yorker as well as narrated fiction, reporting, criticism and more, download the New Yorker app. For more New Yorker literary audio, try the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or the Writer's Voice, which presents new fiction read by the author. You can find those and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. Let us know what you think of this podcast by rating and reviewing it in your podcast app, and please follow the show so that you don't miss new episodes. This episode of the New Yorker Poetry Podcast was produced by John Lamay with editing by Michelle o'. Brien. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Atunde Ajua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. Thanks for listening. Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts
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A
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