“Wouldn’t it be amazing to learn the craft of writing from Kim Addonizio at a dive bar? Or from devorah major at the Church of John Coltrane? Or from Paul Hoover at the Crucible!”

These are the enthusiastic musings of Myron Michael (MFA Writing 2006), a poet, teacher, recording artist, and proprietor of the micro label Rondeau Records. “I’m envisioning an annual festival of free neighborhood writing workshops taught by performers, poets, and thespians. It would cover everything from semantic poetry to phonetic poetry—poetry and dance, poetry and photography. Slam, sonnets, spoken word, songwriting, rondeaus, rap. It’s all poetry.”

Based in Oakland, Michael is also the founder of the poetry publication project Move or Die and curator of the monthly reading series HELIOTROPE. In August he will join other ambitious emerging poets and novelists at the week-long Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has already attended the annual conference twice, the first time as a student, the second as a work-study scholar. This year he returns as the resident emcee. The conference is an immersion experience, offering the chance to hone his craft not only in manuscript building, but also in organizational skills, as he pursues his goal of one day directing a writing conference or festival.

“Writing builds bridges.”

This is something he knows from deep personal experience. After CCA he spent three years teaching writing workshops to urban and incarcerated youth at schools such as Downtown High School, Ida B. Wells High School, and Log Cabin Ranch (a long-term rehabilitation facility for delinquent youth). He secured the three-year residency through WritersCorps, which places teaching artists in communities.

“At a site like Log Cabin, where there is a dress code, individuality is most expressed when it is spoken. Sometimes voice is all the students have. So it becomes important, just as important as writing.” Many of the boys make small modifications to their uniforms to assert their individuality. “I can’t remember exactly all of what they did, but I do remember there were a lot of dreadlocks, and so they’d fashion their dreadlocks differently.

“One student had this cool about him that made me think immediately that he was a poet. We talked about hip-hop, and I asked him if he knew what a sonnet was. There are 16 bars in a rap verse, or 16 lines, I said, but 16 bars is really just eight couplets, or 8 pairs of 2 lines. Sonnets have 14 lines or seven couplets, and the illest thing is that you can arrange a sonnet in what are called stanzas and follow a rhyme scheme and be like Shakespeare. He and I read a lot of sonnets, mostly love poems, and worked a lot together, and WritersCorps ended up publishing a chapbook of his love poems.”

In teaching incarcerated youth, Michael draws on his own experience growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the age of 11, he played truant with a gang of high-school kids. “We weren’t really bad, we’d just break into houses and choreograph dance routines. I spent two weeks in juvenile hall, and I had never been in such a small space before. My saving grace was Greek mythology, fantasizing about having special abilities.” The combination of these proto-superheroes and the Christianity introduced by his mother gave him the ideological framework to rebuild. “I was looking for a model for goodness. Christianity felt profound, like something was being decided for me, or I was deciding something for myself. I knew I needed one thing or another to facilitate my growth, so I started writing rhymes and playing basketball. I was a day-camp counselor and supervisor in an after-school program. Basketball, writing, community service, and hip-hop were the geometric lines forming my square.”

And he continues to actively seek out challenging experiences. In the period before he started work at Log Cabin Ranch, he had a lull of three months and decided to spend it living on the streets of San Francisco. “I’d worked with the homeless in Grand Rapids. At CCA I rehearsed with a band at a studio near César Chávez Street and I’d see this underpass just before Potrero Avenue starts and say to myself every time, without fail, that if I were homeless that’s where I’d sleep. I was curious—I didn’t have a job, and I had time. Christians are told, ‘Give up all your possessions and follow Christ,’ but that wasn’t something I’d seen Christians actually do. I wasn’t trying to be a missionary or a romantic. It was a question of: Let’s just go for a walk and figure out stuff, spiritually.”

An essay and excerpts from the poems he wrote as a result of that experience were published in Tea Party magazine, the City Lights anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds, and Fourteen Hills magazine. When he saw that people were interested, he took it further. The published poems became Quintet (Prelude Insomnia), one in a series of seven books loosely based on Plato’s Symposium, which is about the path of absolute beauty. He’s currently seeking a publisher.

About the MFA Program in Writing

Learn more about CCA's MFA Program in Writing, including how to apply.