Adrian Matejka Reads C.D. Wright

February 25, 2026·46 min·4 clips

Adrian Matejka never finished Miles Davis's autobiography — and explains why he never will.

Kevin Young begins with the poem. He brings in Adrian Matejka and returns to the show's usual shape, a poet choosing a New Yorker archive poem before reading his own work. Matejka's choice of C.D. Wright feels deliberate. He talks about wanting some encounters with beloved work to stay ahead of him, because a first reading only happens once. That gives the conversation its pull. Rereading can make a poem richer, but it cannot bring back the first shock of meeting it. Young catches that tension and moves Matejka toward a wider question: what happens when poems nobody had seen suddenly become available? Larry Levis comes up as one answer. Newly found poems are not treated like scraps. They can shift how earlier work sounds. Young then turns to Zora Neale Hurston and the idea that some texts were preserved rather than simply lost. That distinction suits the episode. Some work waits because readers, institutions, or the culture around it were not ready. The thought circles back to Wright. Matejka and Young treat the poem as something that keeps gaining force after publication, partly because the reader keeps changing. The conversation stays quiet and attentive. It does not force the poem into a tidy lesson. It leaves room for surprise, preservation, and the strange gift of a first encounter still waiting in the archive.

As heard by us

A reflective C.D. Wright reading becomes a tender argument for archives, rereading, and poems still waiting to arrive.

Adrian Matejka's conversation with Kevin Young treats C.D. Wright's "Against the Encroaching Greys" less as a sealed artifact than as a living pressure on the present.

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Why you'd press play

You want a C.D. Wright conversation that lingers on first readings and the way archives keep changing what a poem can mean.

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