Oleg Gruz:

- Are poets born rather than made?

— I guess poets are made. I’d lived a long life before I could say that I am a poet, despite the fact I’ve started writing since I was 15. This is a great responsibility, not everybody is ready to carry! I started writing when I felt the epoch’s nerve. Though I guess I could have discussed some trivial topics in my poems, let’s take for instance lovy love, or the way I suffer without this or that chick, but it’s all so biased. In my case I try to indicate the world as it is around me via my poems, to provide people with a kind of an unedited version, you know. This is poemography. I can’t say for sure what I am doing all that for. I guess there’s some high message about it. I guess I am their tool to create.

- What could you do provided you were not a poet?

— Anything. I guess that would be something good anyway. The most important is that I would definitely become a man. There was a time in Rostov when I put my texts on to minuses. I issued four albums. Then I quit. It can be compared to sex with a condom and without it. The poetry gets much more pleasant without it. You just come out to the stage, and there’s no music accompaniment, here you are and here they are. It’s difficult to be a poet. It’s much easier to become a singer who performs to the music, but I search for no easy ways. This is more honest. Not everything can be told to the music. There are things we are entitled to listen to in silence.

- Who needs poetry today and what for does he need it? Has the rhyme such an influence it had, for instance, in 19th century?

— Who needs poetry today? That depends on what poetry and what “today” are we talking about. In order to be needed modern poetry has to be informative and entertaining, didactic, but not moralistic, secular and actual, contemporary and timeous. It always needs to have the spirit of time.

Occasionally I read modern authors on stihi.ru and I see that mostly such poetry is needed by no one, but by the “poets” who wrote it. Although there’re sometimes pleasant cases of perfect poetical form, but!... There’s one more “but”: usually plain letters aren’t enough for a modern reader, as a lot of them have long ago become viewers and listeners. The reader is brought up on shows. Besides there’s a lot of poetry in modern music.