On Saturday, October 11, 2014, Third Man Books hosted Literary Death Match in TMR's Blue Room. After a few pile drivers, flung folding chairs, and Walt Whitman whiskies, poet Adrian Matejka emerged victorious. Recorded live from the melee by Mindy Watts and released first to Vault members, here is Matejka’s (acc. Chet Weise) “Maggot Brain,” an elegy for legendary Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel.
Download the track posted here.
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His first collection of poems,The Devil’s Garden, won the 2002 New York / New England Award from Alice James Books. His second collection, Mixology, was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin Books in 2009. Mixology was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature – Poetry. His most recent book,The Big Smoke, was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, the 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He is a winner of the Julia Peterkin Award and recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2010, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares,Poetry, and Prairie Schooner among other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and is currently working on a new collection of poems and a graphic novel. For more information about Adrian and his writing visit Adrian’s homepage.
Chet Weise's writing appears in Poems & Plays, Bayou Magazine, Copper Nickel, Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days, among other publications, and was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. Weise also co-edited with Ben Swank the anthology Language Lessons: Volume I published by Third Man Books in 2014. A musician as well, Weise's work includes Estrus recording artists The Quadrajets and the Immortal Lee County Killers. Weise grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and currently lives in Nashville where he works for Third Man Books. He was banned from Canada during the 2008 calendar year.
More Matejka is available in the pages of Third Man Books’ Language Lessons Volume I
