How this Instagram poet turned being a good guy into a thriving business
By: Juliana Feliciano Reyes
Tags: Poetry, Love, Discover, Instagram

Vision, along with fellow slam poet Jamarr Hall, started going on cross-country tours with Mike. They’d ask the audience and often find that most of the people there — usually black women, though Vision and Mike both said it varied from city to city — had never been to a poetry show before.

That’s the beauty of Mike, Vision says: he’s writing for “regular folks.” It’s a radical act given that poetry is so often thought of as an art form for elites, a storied tradition of dead white men (and sometimes women). Instagram has started to change that, with “Instapoets” like Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav and R.M. Drake gaining mass appeal, but some still rail against them, insisting that they’re hacks. Mike says he’s been a victim of this elitism.

To this day, he says, no one in Philly has invited him to be the feature at an open mic. Maybe it’s because they heard he sold out the Theatre of the Living Arts, a major Philly concert venue, he muses. Maybe they think Mike thinks he’s too big time.

“My reception gets like that, I’ve noticed,” he says. “Just hate, shade. … I think that’s how the poetry community has felt about me this entire time. Because as far as poets nationally, historically, nobody’s ever really done what I’ve done.”

But Christopher K.P. Brown, a veteran Philly slam poet who organizes open mics, says that it’s not a matter of Mike’s success as a poet. “He definitely sold out the TLA and we applaud that,” Brown told me over Facebook Messenger. The reason Mike hasn’t been warmly embraced by the poetry community is because he never made an effort to engage it, he said. Brown also takes issue with Mike’s writing, which he says “shames” women.

“As men, we don’t have the experience of being a woman. So who are we to dictate how women should carry themselves? Especially when we aren’t willing to admit our own faults as men when it comes to how we treat women,” Brown wrote. “Most of the poets I have talked to feel like this is something we’ve seen before. Because black women are the financial backbone of spoken word, some poets will come in, catering to women, but not in a way that gives them a voice.”

Mike’s writing, Brown said, takes advantage of “old school thinking” about gender roles that still largely pervades our patriarchal society. “So even when discussing women’s issues it’s okay for a man (Mike) to be leading that conversation. Instead of there being a woman using her experience as a woman to speak to these same issues,” he wrote.

Mike declined to respond to these comments, but his fans told me that they don’t find it problematic that Mike is writing about women’s empowerment, which may also speak to the fraught state of sisterhood. “Honestly, it’s less judgmental coming from a man,” said JaSonyia “Jay” Bridy, a 23-year-old fan based in Richmond, Va. “Women have a tendency to say certain things out of spite or use judgmental tones to shape their work.”

When it comes down to it, Brown says Mike is successful in business “because he’s far more concerned with the business of poetry than he is actual poetry.”

When I visit Mike at his apartment last summer to interview him again, we talk for more than two hours when I finally work up the courage to ask him about the quality of his poetry. I raise the issue that his writing can be kind of corny. In hopes of making my point, I point to the wooden wall art hanging behind him. It has a list of cliches: Be yourself. Take chances. Let go. It’s like that, I tell him, and to my surprise, he yelps, his voice cracking, “Yes!”

He jumps up from his suede loveseat. “Because that thing,” he points to the wall art, “is universal!” He’s excited, like I’ve touched on something that no one seems to understand about him. “Ultimately, I have to find the perfect cadence that a girl from Southwest Philly and a girl from South Central and a girl from Southwest Asia all can enjoy,” he says. That cadence is simple enough that it’s accessible and vague enough that his readers can map themselves onto it. (A poetry critic described the same quality in Kaur’s work as “kind of genius.”)

“I could write poetry that knocks women’s socks off,” he tells me, “but what good is that if my overall message is to empower women, and the women who are in the most danger of their empowerment being in jeopardy are the type of women who couldn’t appreciate a well-written poem?” “But why are you assuming they can’t appreciate a well-written poem?” I ask. “I’m not assuming they can’t appreciate a well-written poem. I’m just not going to take the gamble with the communication.”

It is a gamble. As an artist who rose to fame on social media, Mike is hyper attuned to what his audience likes. He gets immediate data, in the form of likes, on every single poem he posts. So far, this kind of poetry, the kind he calls “universal,” is working. So why would he risk changing it?