Mike the PoeT runs all of his shows as if everyone in the room is family, even if he's never seen them before. This may be because he is an artist born of Los Angeles, a 3rd generation Angelino and a tour-bus driver. There isn't a corner of this city Mike hasn't trekked through. He performs regularly at Blue Nile Cafe and Blue Chips Gallery. You can hear him and his words in bookstores, galleries, museums, nightclubs, even churches across Beverly Hills, Downtown, Echo Park, Long Beach, Hollywood and Santa Monica. There isn't a patch of asphalt in Los Angeles that Mike doesn't love. Up and down the streets you can hear his lyrical verse echo, literally.

After graduating from UCLA in 1997, Mike got his commercial driver’s license and a gig as a tour guide. He led tours up and down the coast, from San Francisco to the Grand Canyon. Over the last decade Mike’s become known for his L.A. City Tours, a composite of poetry and history. His “The Poets Beat Neon Cruise” hosted by the Museum of Neon Art was recently written up in the Washington Post.

In an interview with Kotori Magazine Mike says of tour-guiding:

One night last summer at 33 1/3 Books, then on Alvarado, Mike was hosting. Many regulars read. I read, too, some piece I'd been experimenting with for a while. But the highlight of the night was when a kid named Anthony, a big baby-faced 16 year-old from Compton stepped up to do a piece he wrote. It was his first time. He was nervous. But Mike stood by him, encouraging the young poet and the crowd followed Mike's lead, cheering Anthony on. And when the youngster had finished, he smiled with a sense of arrival. I understood then what Mike had meant and will continue to mean to the creative community of Los Angeles.



In a way, today marks a big day in Los Angeles literature. Not just literature, actually, but in Los Angeles Culture. Tonight marks the release of our city's own Mike the PoeT's first book, I am Alive in Los Angeles. Tonight and Saturday night, he'll be reading and performing from his collection of poetry, prose, and significant lists.

-July 20, 2006 at M.J. Higgins Gallery
244 S. Main Street, Downtown L.A., 8:15PM

-July 22, 2006 "L.A. Reprrazent!" Book Signing 5:00-9:00PM
Crewest Gallery, 110 Winston, LA, CA, 90013
with live painting by MearOne

Mike the PoeT is the first of our new "LA's Next Icon" feature. The series features those writers, artists, performers and occasionally personalities who are locally established, beloved by and in love with the city, and poised to burst onto the national and worldwide stage. Mike has established himself as a true cultural figure, a champion of the creative spirit of Los Angeles, and his influence will spill nationwide.



The cover features the art of MearOne, one of the more important Los Angeles artists whose work has been shown all over the world and a member of Mike's crew, Poets of the RoundTable. You might remember one of his pieces on the billboard above the Union on La Brea. His work perfectly complementing the cityscape that Mike has created with his verse.

It is a completely unique book. It made me think about all the streets I've driven on, about all the sidewalks I've walked on, about the night my friends and I tried to see if we could get lost and drove in circles for hours until we ended up near Jefferson, right by the Fedco on La Cienega. It's hard to explain the feel of the book, but let me try. It's as if Mike understands this city well enough to know that all he needs to do is open my eyes and step aside and I'll see what he sees, the undeniably unique beauty that resides along the fault lines that often threaten to crack this city apart.

From the Introduction:

See, where some artists such as the White Trash Apocalypse Tour, who are more interested in leaving the mark, "WE WERE HERE," Mike the PoeT and his traveling group of artists want to say, "YOU WERE HERE." He wants every corner of the city to know that it has something special that draws him there. He wants to travel the freeways and city streets that he knows so well, the roads that connect the points of the city until it is one work of art.

From the poem "Hollywood:"

Aside from poems and stories, the book also contains lists. LA lists. Best LA Movies. Best LA Albums. And there's this Best LA Books list:

There's one more book that belongs on that list. His own.

Mike the PoeT aka Mike Sonksen is co-founder of getunderground.com and music editor for Jointz Magazine. His spoken word CD "I am Alive in Los Angeles" was given 4 stars by Urb Magazine.

There's a new article about a long time Los Angeles staple, SA Griffin, that appears in the latest issue of Los Angeles Alternative. It rightfully gives due to the work SA has done both as a poet/performer and as a pioneer of sorts with his wild road-trips and Rock & Roll poetry tours: the Lost Tribe, Carma Bums, White Trash Apocalypse Tour. He currently DJ's on killradio.org and continues to pound out his simple and beautiful poetry.

Viggo Mortensen (yes, Viggo of The Rings), who himself is a Los Angeles poet who pops up at the legendary Beyond Baroque for readings, even made a film about SA and The Carma Bums called The Luxurious Tigers of Obnoxious Agreement. That’s respect. That’s star treatment.

I too remember the Carma Bums stomping ground, the Onyx on Vermont. It was a narrow and deep space with stark white walls and a huge "ONYX" sign outside. They had art hanging on the walls and poets and writers reading and writing their work inside. I first went there with my boy Nate, who insisted on what a cool place it was. This was in '89. I don't know if SA was there that night, but there wasn't much poetry. They did have horrible coffee, though.

As fantastic a poet SA Griffin has been, the article overemphasizes the significance of his “crowd,” whether it’s the Onyx (even if Beck became Beck!) or the Bums or the Lost Tribe. Unfortunately, they were embraced by a scene that has never been inclusive. If you have ever been to an event sponsored by Los Angeles Alternative and/or killradio.org, such as the release party for Society magazine from Pale House Press down at historic Cole's in downtown, you’ll understand. They ARE the gentrifying crowd.

There is so much poetry in Los Angeles outside of that crowd. There are artists and venues that continue to be more important to developing more poets. Luis Rodriguez and his Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural. Mike the PoeT and his Poets of the Roundtable. The Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective. Da Poetry Lounge at Greenway Court Theater. All of them completely inclusive and actually trying to make the streets of LA flow with poetry, not to use those streets to speed their way to stardom and hipster cred.

See, even back in '87, when I first discovered poetry in this city, there was no greater shortage of poets here than in any other place in the world. I was constantly surrounded by hundreds of poets, all members of what would become the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective. They were doctors and housewives and lawyers and mechanics and engineers and psychos and actresses and grandfathers and high school students (like myself).

I would like to say that poetry is among the most popular forms of writing in the United States, but this is simply not the case. Most of us, when we do read, read poetry more than twenty years old before we read anything contemporary. In fact, at least here in Portland, most people read poetry placed on the insides of buses. But there is a singular pleasure that comes from listening poets like William Stafford read his poem“Ask Me”to the House of Representatives, or listen to the electric audience in a recording of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” or the peculiar and somewhat cheeky way he says “poking the meats and eyeing the grocery boys” in “A Supermarket in California.”

With this spirit in mind, and with an ear toward poetry as something that might be better heard rather than read, a new website called iPoems will be offering poems for 50p in England.

I hope that something like this comes up in the states. Popular American poetry is most often found in its popular music but, as Ginsberg said, “I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe.”