Poems are like butterflies... you don't craft poems, you catch them

I've probably written more rhymes then many well known rappers, here are my thoughts on how good poems happen

Spring tree blossoms juxtaposed against the gritty urban landscape of the Shockoe Bottom District of Richmond, Virginia. Spring 2019. #steveemigphotos

A poem is words collected into lines, pieces of language, where some idea or thought is expressed. We all know that. But poems go places that other forms of the written word don’t. I don’t drink alcohol at all now, and I wasn’t a great drinker back when I did drink. But the levels of alcohol, for some reason, have always been my favorite metaphor for the different types of writing. Newspapers, or news websites today, are beer. There’s a lot of fluff, not much substance (alcohol), but that works for a really large group of people. Magazines, super hero comic books, manga and serial novels are like wine. There’s some more depth, and they draw a different type of reader. The typical popular novels, like romance novels, action novels, and thrillers are the mixed drinks of reading. A little more sophisticated and deeper, some more intense ideas going on, and take a bigger commitment to read than others. Again, they attract the more hardcore readers than the other forms mentioned, and come in a wide variety of flavors and styles for the serious reader.

Then we get into the realm of literature, with deeper themes and more refined writing. These are the 80 proof books, the Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Patron, and Glenfiddich Scotch of writing. These are deeper in themes and subject matter. The really hardcore readers dive into these books. The deepest writing, let’s say Ayn Rand with Atlas Shrugged, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J.D. Salinger with The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass Family writings, Robert Heinlein with Stranger in a Strange Land, Nail Gaiman with Sandman, Alan Moore with The Watchmen or V for Vendetta, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, those can get up into harder alcohol, some may even get up into the the Bacardi 151 level. These books go really deep into intense ideas, they are tougher to read and understand. Sure, other people would have other books on that list, but those are the books that go deep into some aspect of the mystery of human beings and our doings here on planet Earth.

Then there’s poetry. Poetry is the Everclear of the writing world. 180 proof, 90% alcohol. Poetry is where a writer can be honest, or much more honest than in other forms of writing. You can write a poem asking your boss why he’s such an asshole, and do it in metaphor he’s to stupid to understand, even if he did read it. You can write about why you want to kill your ex for cheating on you, actually express those feelings without going to jail. A poet can write about standing on the edge of the cliff of suicide, when there seems to be no way forward, and all hope is lost. Or She can write a poem for a friend who’s standing on the cliff. You can write a poem and ask God why we have wars, if he (or she) is omnipotent. Or you can ask the Universe (or any of the gods of human history) the questions you’re afraid to ask, the questions you’re afraid to even admit to yourself. You can ask the Universe for answers in a poem. Sometimes you get answers back, that’s where some of the great poems in history come from.

In poetry, the poet often wraps their honesty in description and metaphor or simile, and asks the toughest of questions, and dives into the most intense of subjects. But poems can also be light, satirical, funny, sarcastic, and whimsical, and just make people laugh. Or maybe laugh and think, which is quite an accomplishment. Poems, in my opinion, are the most concentrated form of writing. It’s where we can be honest as possible, and get away with it.

The intuitive drive to do something that doesn’t make logical sense. That’s how poems begin. I shot this photo above, which I find beautiful, just after dawn one morning, in the spring of 2019. I was a homeless man, living in a city that I’d never been to before, when I landed there in late August of 2018. I spent about 8 months in Richmond, trying to find a way to get back to making a living. Ultimately, an old acquaintance from the BMX world paid my way back out to California, with plans to work promoting a new website business. But during those months, I wandered all over one of the oldest and most historic cities in the U.S., seeing it with an outsider’s eyes, and catching dozens of photos of the city.

In the spring of 2019, I slept on the southern bank of the James river, under the long I-95 bridge, in the Manchester district. I walked across Manchester Bridge, over the mighty James River, one morning, to the bus stop I went to every day. I saw this tree blossoming, in this super intensely urban landscape, where the freeways and railroad tracks were raised high above everyone’s heads, due to the repeated floods that had happened in that part of the city over more than 300 years.

Instead of catching the bus to go eat breakfast at McDonald’s, I had this urge to take photos. I followed that intuitive feeling. I walked around this area for about an hour in the crisp spring air, shooting a bunch of photos, with a ten year old iPhone 5 a friend had given me. I got several pretty cool shots as the sun rose over Richmond. It wasn’t planned, and I’m not a great photographer. But decades of looking at the world a bit differently than other people led me to see a cool image, the fresh buds of a small tree, backlit in the dawn sun, against this weird urban landscape that already looked like something out of a gritty, steampunk-style movie set. The call to shoot some photos in that dawn light was stronger than the call to go eat breakfast, so I shot photos. That intuitive urge to shoot photos that morning came the same way poems would come along for me, once I got started writing them, in the late 1980’s.

                                                               Play
                                                The world's a stage
                                                 Just grand in scale
                                                      Drama erupts
                                                   From our travails
                                                   It's one great Play
                                                  Go find your part
                                               Some day you'll realize
                                                     The world is art

                                                   -The White Bear

I’ve written somewhere around 400 or 500 poems in my life. Nearly all of those were written between 1987 and 2008. I’ve self-published about 150 of them in three zines in the 1990’s. I managed to lose nearly all of my poems, most in a move to North Carolina in 2008, where I left what little I owned in a storage unit in California. I wasn’t able to pay the back payments on the bill, and the unit got auctioned off. 165 of my best poems were handwritten in notebooks in that storage unit, written between 1997 and 2008. I also had all of them typed into the memory of a Mac Powerbook, that was in a pawn shop in California, when I made the trip east. I lost the laptop with the digital version of 10 years worth of poems as well. In time I lost the last couple copies of my poetry zines.

I have maybe 10 or 15 of those 400+ poems left, unless the copies of my zines resurface some day. There are still copies out there. I call those the Lost Poems now. I stopped writing poetry after that move in 2008, the poems just didn’t come any more, after losing nearly all of them. I’ve only written a handful since. you can check most of those at these links: “Love Lies Bleeding,” “ Life: What Will You Do?” “The Douchebag’s War Cry,” “Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos,” and “Ode to the word Fuck.” “Fuck” is actually a three minute comedy bit, written as a poem, which I do have memorized, from when I was thinking about trying stand-up comedy, back in 2007.

You can decide if any of those are decent poems, by your standards. Poems are incredibly subjective. There are poems that are considered great by the academics who categorize such things, but that few average people like, or bother to read. We all had to read poems in school, most of which didn’t have a lot of impact on most of us. But when a person finds a poem that really strikes a chord with them, then they really like that poem. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is one of the best examples of a poem a lot of everyday people connect with.

What does it take to write good, possibly even great, poems? It takes a lot of practice writing really terrible poetry, which is how you teach your writing hand how to listen, and write, the words as they come, without editing along the way. In my experience, no poem ever comes out as the poem I sat down to write. They all veer off in some different direction as I write them. Poems have a mind of their own. I learned to get used to that. More than anything, like I said in the title, as corny as it sounds, good and great poems are like butterflies, you don’t sit down and craft them. You catch them. They come when they feel like it, usually with a one or two tempting lines at first.

In my experience, I have to stop whatever I’m doing, right then, grab a pen and paper, and sit down and write the poem, until it feel like it’s done. If I don’t stop and write it down, right then, or memorize it, then it’s gone. That poem never comes back. Ever. That’s my experience. I’ve lost nearly as many good poems as I’ve written down, mostly in the early years of writing them. This is why I always have a black ballpoint pen in my pocket, all the time. I’ve carried a pen in my pocket, to capture poems and other random cool thoughts, since 1988.

“… from the ether… creation doles… out the words… to touch their souls…”

-excerpt from one of my lost poems

Where do poems come from? Ah… this is where it gets tricky. People think you just sit down an write a poem, or maybe craft it, tweaking it time after time, to get it just right. There may be poets that write that way. That’s not my experience, at all. My experience is that poems come through the poet, not from the poet. There’s a big difference between the two. My experience is that I often have some little insight, a new thought, perhaps even an epiphany or revelation, a thought where I see something in a different way. A new insight. Sometimes that’s just a single line. Other times, I sense there’s more to that insight, lurking just beyond my reach. I’ll usually think about that insight for a while, usually on and off, throughout that day. I’ve also learned to write that one line down in a notebook, it may fit in something I write, somewhere down the line. Then I just forget about it, and go on with my daily life.

This is where the “creative process,” which has been over analyzed, ad nauseum, comes in. There is the initial cerebral thinking about a question, or a new idea. Then you let that idea go, and just go on with daily life. Go to work. Run some errands. Clean the house. Pick up the kids from their sports, whatever. During this time, the idea will gestate inside your mental, perhaps even spiritual, self. If it was meant to be a poem, it comes back, usually in two to five days, in my experience. When poems come, they come back with force, and want to be written down at that moment.

Usually there’s the first line, and the intuitive urge to write it down, right then, right there. That’s what the pen in my pocket is for. I grab a piece of paper, and write down that first line or two. I forget about everything else going on around me, and just focus on getting the poem on paper. I’ve written poems on a napkin at a bar, on my hand, on a cardboard box because there was no paper around, in a couple of occasions, I’ve memorized whole poems. Usually I can find paper. I write a couple of lines, usually in rhyming couplets, or quatrains, and then fish around for the next lines. The next lines soon follow. I keep writing until the poem feels done. Most of my poems end up being 20 to 40 short lines, usually pairs of rhyming couplets.

The biggest thing I’ve learned about the actual writing of poems is to not judge the words that pop in my head. Write whatever seems to make sense for the poem itself, no matter how absurd your logical mind thinks it is. With poems, you’re not “writing” so much as giving birth, bringing an nebulous insight from the intangible realm of ideas into the tangible world, the physical world of inked words on a piece of paper. A poet is really a midwife of ideas, bringing them from that place somewhere outside of our thoughts, through the poet’s mind, into the world of form, as words on paper. Don’t judge, just let the words come, even if they seem like nonsense or gibberish. Watch this “Barbaric Yaup” scene from the movie Dead Poets Society. That’s the best acted out example of how poems come into being that I know of.

My poems, over the course of years, usually come out pretty much fully formed. I may change a word or two, here or there. But the poems change very little after I get them on paper. I don’t craft my poems, agonizing over just the right words or phrasing, for days or weeks or months. I “catch” them, I let them come, let the words flow onto the paper. You can always edit later, if needed. It took me years to fully realize that.

Then, I have a personal rule that I don’t look at the poem again, at all, for at least a week. When I do look at it again, I want to have fresh eyes, and some distance of time, from the creative part. You can always edit the poem later. Personally, I wait at least a week, then see what I have, and edit it as needed. On many occasions I’ve gone back, read a poem, and thought, “Holy shit, I wrote that?” There’s a magic to getting a good poem down on paper.

So where do poems come from? The collective consciousness? The superconscious mind, as some people have called it? From the poet’s own subconscious mind? From some level of the spirit realm that all religions tell us exists? I don’t know. And, to be honest, I don’t really care. The good poems seem to come from somewhere else, not my mind. Many great writers and artists have said the same kind of thing in interviews or books. My poems seem to come through my mind. It’s a mystery, and I leave it at that. In my first poetry zine, We’re on the Same Mental Plane… and it’s Crashing, I wrote a line on the inside front cover. “They aren’t my words or ideas, I’m just the faucet the water flows through.” That’s the best I can describe it.

                                                             In the grass I lie
                                                  Gazing at the blue heavens
                                                              I lie wondering

                               -Haiku I wrote at age 9, for a 4th grade assignment

Poems aren’t always serious and thought provoking. I wrote a poem, a pretty raunchy one, about what I thought might be going on in the Mystery Machine, that van the Scooby-Doo crew drives around in the cartoon. I’ve written several “punk songs,” back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, which were really sarcastic. I had a punk band record two of them for a BMX video I made. I’ve written mushy love poems about girlfriends, or women I wanted to date, like most poets, when I was younger. Those were super sappy love, or occasionally lust, poems. But most of my poems have been more philosophical themes, poems about trying to figure out what life’s all about, what the point of life is, and why we’re here on Earth, when it didn’t seem to make much sense.

My first serious girlfriend in Southern California was a singer in a local rock band, who wrote her own songs. She got me started writing “song lyrics,” in 1987, when I was 19. I tried to write her a hit song. Over a few months, I filled up 7 or 8 of those yellow legal pads (stolen from where we both worked), with really bad poems. When we first met, she was interviewing where I worked, I came around the corner, saw her, and she stared into my eyes. Boom.

I woke up that night, maybe 2:30 or 3:00 am, with a couple of lines in my head, “Time it will pass, but I’m not afraid, I saw destiny, in your eyes today.” I found a pen and some paper, and wrote those lines down. I had completely forgotten the lines when I woke up the next morning. I was glad I wrote them down. We started dating a few days later. I started writing lots of bad “song lyrics” soon after. As time passed, and I filled up those yellow pads of paper with ideas, once in a while a couple of good lines would come along. But most of it was crap. But that’s the start. Everyone has to be a beginner before moving up to a better level of work, at everything, including poetry.

I don’t count all those yellow pad poems in the 400 or 500 poems I’ve written, those were the crap “song lyrics” I wrote, which slowly taught me how to let the words flow, when a poem idea would come. The 400 or 500 poems were after the 6 or 7 yellow pads of really bad poetry in 1987-1988.

                                                             AirFireEarthWater

                                                A FEW there be that find the path
                                                A FEW there be that hear the call
                                                  A FEW there be that wake up to
                                                  The mystery and wonder of it all

                                                                 -The White Bear

When that girlfriend dumped me in the spring of 1988, I went home after work, and listened to the song “American Pie,” by Don McClean, over and over and over. While listening, I wrote a poem called “Journey of The White Bear.” I showed her the poem, and she said it was the first really good poem I ever wrote. Several years later, that was the first poem in my first poetry zine. It led to my nickname, “The White Bear,” which I took as my pen name for my poetry. I told that story in this early Substack post.

After she and I parted ways, I kept writing “song lyrics,” even though I had no intentions of starting a band. Those “lyrics” were written in spiral pad notebooks, hidden in a box, in the back of my closet. The front of each note book said, “Just some stuff I wrote.” I realized writing lyrics was a good and cheap form of therapy, and I had a lot of issues to work through. By then, writing “songs” was a habit, so I kept writing, and didn’t tell anyone about them.

Four years later, a roommate showed me a book of poetry by Henry Rollins, Black Coffee Blues, that he thought was really cool. I read through Henry’s poems, and thought, “I could do this. I could write a book of poems.” My notebooks were in a storage unit by that time. I went there and dug through them, I had 6 or 7 notebooks full of “song lyrics.” I realized I was never going to start a band. I didn’t have song lyrics, I had a couple of hundred poems. “I guess I’m a poet,” I finally admitted. I edited those poems down into my first poetry zine, We’re on the same Mental Plane… and it’s Crashing, which I published in 1992. I kept writing poetry on a regular basis until I lost nearly all of my poems, in the move, in 2008.

So those are my basic thoughts on writing poetry. If you want to start writing poems, just sit down and try to write the ideas you have. Don’t wait for them to happen at first, just sit down and write your ideas. They probably won’t be very good. That’s where everyone starts. Don’t compare your work to great poets, and don’t be afraid of being a beginner.

Then leave them alone, don’t show them to anyone, and write more. You may find that, out of the blue, you’ll get an idea to rewrite one of those poems. Then go back and rewrite it. Just write a bunch of crap, and don’t show it to people, and get used to really hearing the faint whispers of ideas pop into your head. Your poetry should improve over time. You can decide later about whether you want to publish anything, go to poetry readings, and things like that.

I’ve linked several of my remaining poems above. I will link some more here, pretty soon. You can check them out if you like. Good luck putting your own words on paper in the future.

There are no paid links in this post.