Michael Graves is an award-winning, West Coast Poet who lives in the redwood-covered mountains just outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. His unusual approach to poetic subjects spans the spectrum from the cerebral to the deeply erotic, and has won the hearts of readers worldwide.
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As a beginning poet, I started writing poetry in high school in order to stay awake in a math class. It wasn’t until I took a poetry class with James Doyle in the mid-1970's at the University of Northern Colorado, that I began to understand quality as it relates to poetry. Among other things, Jim helped me to see that if I couldn’t express an idea with aspects that were different than it had been said before, why bother? Around that time I began the process of growing up as a poet. I owe him a lot in that regard.
The purpose of a poet - of any artist - is to provide a way for people to re-charge their batteries; to get back on top of life when it has been too rough for them. To give them a different way of looking at things, which helps them to move forward. This doesn't mean that poetry should be sweetness and light. Far from it. Read my pieces "Belly of the Beast" or "Vengeance (lex talionis)" if you want examples. Or "Poetic Convergence" if you want to see a different description of poetry as an art form. The poetic message can be stated in many ways; it can take many emotional forms in rekindling life and a sense of wonderment in a reader. But poetry must deal in truth.
When you write for yourself, you can write whatever you want. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you. But when you write for others, that writing must contain truths that resonate or which are about to resonate with the public to whom you are writing. Truth is what connects you to your readers. If you don't have that, you don't have shit.
Poetry has undergone a substantial change in the past decade. I think that poetry's got a better shot than music these days. It used to be that music was all over the radio waves; exposure was paid for and directed by record companies and promoters. There were massive amounts of money, massive crowds and huge fanbases. Poetry on the other hand, was a completely different game. The poet played to tiny audiences – if any. There was no real money to speak of. With the exception of rarified literary circles, poets were regarded as somewhat arcane oddballs.
Now, for poetry, every day is like the Monterey Folk Festival in '63 or Newport in '64. You see new poets everywhere plying their craft. The internet is a stage before an audience of millions of readers. And depending on the platform, these are people who READ — by virtue of the venue. I believe that poetry is in the process of attaining a massive level of worldwide popularity, greater than at any other time in history. I talk about it in my piece “On Poetry and Social Responsibility.”
I am very happy to be here, right now. Writing poetry. I hope that you enjoy reading my pieces and that they open doors for you, to new places in your imagination.