The Poet- #3: Magic Happens When a Pen Meets Paper

Chapter 3- The Poet: How I Became The White Bear

I like big books and I cannot lie. This is me in 2021, masked during the pandemic, while living homeless in the San Fernando Valley, just north of L.A.. I shot this outside of Iliad Book shop in North Hollywood, which is an amazing second hand book store, and also has a lot of cool stuff on the exterior. #steveemigphotos

“From the ether, creation doles

out the words, to touch their souls.”

Excerpt from one of my “Lost Poems” 

There’s a magic that happens when a person writes something down on a piece of paper.  Most of us do it nearly every day.  But the act of writing something down on a piece of paper begins with a thought.  A thought is something completely intangible, it’s in our head, or somewhere.  The thought has no weight, no mass, it’s some kind of energy in our mind.  The simple act of writing something down brings an intangible thought into the physical world.  Even something as simple as a shopping list, “I need cereal, milk, and bananas.”  The thought is now a physical object that has a shape on a piece of paper, a form, and it can be read and understood by other people.  That’s a big change, bringing the intangible into the tangible world. We ignore that great bit of magic on a daily basis.

Some people write down shopping lists, some people write down notes to their wife, husband, kids, or a friend.  But the simple act of writing over human history includes Euclid and Pythagoras writing down math and geometry formulas that have shaped civilization.  Cave men and women painted and drew on cave walls more than 35,000 years ago.  Plato and Marcus Aurelius wrote down philosophies and insights into human nature.  Shakespeare wrote plays that are still performed over 400 years later.  Pencils and pens have written down the novels of Mark Twain, Stephen King, Dean Koontz and thousands of others.  Musicians from Bach and Beethoven, to Dolly Parton, to Metallica, to my personal favorite, Mike Ness of Social Distortion, wrote down musical notes and lyrics for us to listen to.  Rappers from the Sugar Hill Gang to Run DMC to Ice Tea, Ice Cube, Eminem, and now Ren, have written rhymes enjoyed by millions.  

Then there are the poets, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the dark tales of Edgar Allen Poe, to the thoughts of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the strength of Maya Angelou’s words, to the Beat Poets, to all the living poets in today’s world.  Poets are a weird breed.  Poets are usually seeking something, answers to questions that often seem to have no answers.  Poets are a determined, and often a pretty crazy bunch of individuals.  I know, I’m a poet.  

We are confused or scared or pissed off by the world we see around us, a world that doesn’t make sense for a whole bunch of different reasons.  We dive into the fray and dig for sense and meaning and some kind of truth, underneath it all.  Sometimes we find answers, and sometimes those answers pop up, surprising us, in the poems we write while putting pen to paper.  

I’ve lived a pretty weird life, and it doesn’t make sense in any “normal” sort of way.  But, as I started digging into my life as a poet, I’ve found that poetry is really the string tying all the weird pieces of my life together.  For several weeks now, I’ve been writing about my life as a poet in my journal. In this context, my weird life makes some kind of sense.  Sort of. 

The first poem I remember writing was a Japanese-style haiku poem that I wrote as an assignment in the 4th grade.  After our teacher explained the 5-7-5 syllable form of Japanese haikus, she told us all to write a couple of them for class the next day.  I took the school bus back to the big, yellow farmhouse my family lived in that year, 3 or 4 miles outside of the tiny village of Shiloh, Ohio.  I took a pencil and a pad of paper out into our front yard, lay down in the thick grass, near a huge pine tree, I looked up at the sky filled with clouds, and thought for a while.  Then I wrote this haiku:

In the grass I lie

Gazing at the blue heavens

I lie wondering

That haiku poem, the first poem I remember writing, when I was 9-years-old, describes me as well as any other poem I’ve written in the 49 years since.  That was my beginning as a poet, something that took me another 13 or 14 years to come to grips with.  That was followed by decades of writing hundreds of poems.  The Poet is a look into my life seeking answers and writing poems along the way.  Welcome to my weird world.

To continue on to the next chapter of The Poet, follow this link below:

The Poet: part #4: “Life: What Will You Do?” - a poem I wrote in 2018

To go back to chapter 1 of The Poet, follow this link below:

The Poet: How I Became The White Bear- part #1- What if?

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