By David Garyan
FROM: Interlitq.com

DG: Your given name is Mike Sonksen, but in the context of your creative life, you’re known as Mike the PoeT. Some establishments like poets.org write the final letter with a lowercase, while others like Cultural Daily have it as “Mike the PoeT.” Your own Twitter handle is @MikethePoeTLA. Can you, at last, set the record straight and what significance does the uppercase have?

MS: The uppercase T dates back to the early 2000s, when I was hanging out with a lot of visual artists and even graphic designers who were experimenting with typography. I liked how small changes in punctuation and with capitalization could add emphasis and style on both how you said a word and how it looked. Some of it was also just having fun with the visual element of how it appeared on the page. As I have gotten older it no longer really mattered, but I had fun with it early on.

DG: Your poem “I Am Alive in Los Angeles!” has become quite the talking point over the years. It was my great fortune to experience this work for the first time neither in print nor recorded, but through your performance of it in 2010 at the LA Public Library Newer Poets XV reading. Compared to this video from 2008, for example, it seems that there’s always a slight variation in how you read/perform the poem. In this respect, would it be more correct to say that these differences arise out of improvisation, highlighting the impromptu changes the city is given to, or do the contrasts arise consciously, emphasizing human intervention and the degrees to which planning ultimately shape the city’s evolution?

MS: I love this question and improvisation has always been a big part of my poetry performances. The differences are quite often directly connected to the place and space where the poem is being performed. Early on I did a lot of poems out in the street while doing city tours, or even at a backyard party, or some after-hours jam session, so the poem would inevitably mirror the location in some way. The event at the Central Library was a milestone for me because I grew up going there and have always loved that space. That night I was definitely doing my tribute to LA’s literary history and I was also feeling deep gratitude to be able to read a poem in that building.

I had already done poems hundreds of times outside in front of the building along 5th Street across from the US Bank Building and in the rotunda room in the library below the Dean Cornwell murals on the ceiling, but I had never been invited to read in the main auditorium until that night.

I like what you said about human intervention, and I believe Poetry is a living, breathing entity that should reflect where it is being shared. I always like to look around and consider where I am before I start sharing a poem. The poem does change a bit as the city changes—you are definitely right about this. Read Rest of Article Here