The Poet: #5- Most people don't care about most poems, most of the time

Chapter 5 - The Poet: How I Became The White Bear

This is me, Steve Emig, in a selfie from 2022, in front of a Mexican restaurant mural in Studio City, California. When I shot this pic, I didn’t realize it looked like the skeleton was poking me in the neck. #steveemigphotos

As a young kid growing up in Ohio, there was a period heading into junior high where I dreamed of being a bush pilot in Alaska. Have you seen the small airplanes with the really big tires for landing in rough terrain, or planes with pontoons that land on water? I wanted to fly those, or thought I did, as a 12 and 13-year-old. I read a whole bunch of books about the Klondike gold rush, and about Alaska in those years. It was in that reading that I discovered a poet who once lived in Alaska, named Robert Service. Here’s The Man in Black, Johnny cash himself, reading Service’s best known poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

Several of Robert Service’s poems really spoke to me as a kid of 12 or 13. When I read them in class as assignments later on, none of my teachers had ever heard of Robert Service, although he had been well known a couple of generations earlier. He was popular with people in Alaska, and many outdoorsy types in his day. Robert Service, the Scotch-Canadian poet who started writing gold rush inspired poems in the early 1900’s was forgotten by the time my school teachers taught me in the 1970’s. But I didn’t care what other people thought, I really liked some of Robert Service’s poems as a kid.

If you ask a stranger about “poetry,” they will likely think of things they studied in school, or maybe poems they wrote as a lovesick and struggling teenager. Unless someone is actively involved in poetry in some way, it’s doubtful they think of poems much on a day to day basis. But nearly every person has a poem or two, or favorite songs or raps, that they feel a personal connection to. Raps and song lyrics are poems as well, they’re just set to music or rhythm tracks. It’s all poetry. On any given day, most people in the world don’t really give a damn about most of the thousands of poems and songs and raps that exist. But there are a handful of lines of verse, poems, songs or raps, that really do mean a lot to them.

When I first started writing a lot of rhymes in 1987, I wanted to write a hit song for my girlfriend. As the years have passed, I just kept writing poems, initially as cheap self-therapy. I just kept writing poems as the ideas came to me. Writing poems just became something I did in the background of my life, to a greater or lesser extent, at different times. I hope some of my poems will become “that one poem” that really means something to some people out there, even if I never know it. That’s not why I write them, but it’s cool to know the potential is there.

When I was looking for a new project to focus on a couple of months ago, two words popped into my head, “The Poet.” A title, which is really unusual for me. I’m used to having ideas pop into my head, but usually it’s a theme, or maybe a line or two of a poem. Most of the 400 or 500 poems I’ve written in my life didn’t have titles. I tend to just start writing when those ideas come, and add titles when I decide to self-publish the poems, much later. Even my 2019 online book/blog, Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, came to me as an idea to watch a bunch of old apocalyptic movie trailers, and look for themes. The title came much later, after several weeks of writing about those ideas.

But this idea, “The Poet,” was different. So I started thinking about the poems I’d written, and following them back in time. The first poem I remembered writing was the haiku I mentioned before, from 4th grade. I began to write in my journal about different aspects of poetry and being a poet. Like many projects, once I started digging into my life related to writing poetry, I just found more and more ideas in my head about poems, writing poetry, and creativity in general.

It turns out that I have a lot of thoughts about poetry, writing poems, the process of writing poems, the dedication needed to write pretty good poems, and creativity itself. I’ve been writing rough ideas out for a couple of months now, before deciding that I had way too much to say to publish in a little zine. Publishing a small zine about poetry was the original idea. “The Poet,” in my mind, turned into a book. I’ve never published a real print book. I decided to self-publish this idea on my Substack, serially, chapter by chapter. In the spirit of wandering in writing, a creative journey, I’ll see what this “book” looks like, when I finish it online. Then I’ll worry about publishing an actual book.

I made up my own lyrics to songs on the radio as a kid and a teen, never thinking I was “writing.” Eventually I started writing my own ideas down in little poems once in a while. Then a girlfriend motivated me to write a lot more “lyrics,” I was hoping I could write a hit song for her band. After her, writing “song lyrics” just became something I did. I realized writing verses was probably the cheapest form of therapy, and I knew I was a mess, and had a lot of issues to work through. That was around 1988-1989, a long time ago.

For about five years, I wrote poems, hid them in my closet, and never… ever intended to show them to anyone. In many of those “lyrics,” I was searching for answers to help me make sense of life. I was shy, depressed, lonely, and I completely sucked at picking up women. I went to my notebook in some of my darkest times, and asked the Universe for whatever answer seemed most needed at the time.

Eventually I self-published nearly 100 of those poems that I never intended to show to anybody. I put them all in a huge zine, so thick I had to bind the zine with duct tape. It was far too thick to staple. I published two more zines of my poetry later in the 1990’s. I’ve published a few more poems online in more recent years.

It was during those years of writing poems just for myself that I finally realized, “Shit, I’ve got all these “song lyrics” and no plan to ever start a band. Fuck… I’m a poet.” That was way back in 1988 or 1989. Then I just kept writing poems when ideas for them came along.

Chapter 6 of The Poet… coming soon.

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

Go on to Chapter 6 of The Poet- “You’re not doing it right”

Back to Chapter 1 of The Poet

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