If you ask most people, "Are you into poetry?" The general answer will probably be, "Not really." But if you ask the same person what their favorite song is, or who their favorite rapper is, nearly everyone has an answer. Song lyrics are a form of poetry, set to music. Rappers make a living "writin' rhymes." Raps are poetry. Sparked by the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979, and a few others in big afros and tight pants, rapping began to spread into the tough neighborhoods of New York City, and throughout the U.S. Black community soon after.
A year later, the New York City group Blondie, led by Debbie Harry, introduced white kids across the U.S. to rap music with the song "Rapture." I remember where I was when I heard an airplane flew into the first of the Twin Towers on 9/11. I remember where I was when I first met BMX freestyle pros Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and Josh White, in an airport in 1986. I remember where I was when president Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981. And I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the song "Rapture" in 1980. I'm not a big rap fan, I was 13 then. It would be a few more years before we really heard of rap as a thing, in rural America, but "Rapture" in 1980 gave us a taste of things to come.
Kids on street corners in the hoods of America, in the early 1980's, did what decades of English teachers couldn't do, they made poetry cool... first in New York and L.A., and later worldwide.
So while I think most rap sucks today, there is definitely some great rap out there, old and new, and poetry is a lot cooler than it was when I was a kid. I was hanging out at my friend, Tom Conway, at his house, in the country, outside of the small town of Willard, Ohio. We were in his family room, listening to radio station G-98 out of Cleveland. As soon as the song "Rapture" was over, Tom and I looked at each other, "What was THAT?" we asked. Hearing the song for the first time made that much of an impression. It was something different than any music we'd heard before.
When poetry does have an effect on someone, it is often a really profound effect. If you're still not sure that songs can be great poetry, even without the music, listen closely, or read the words to one of these songs: "Because the Night" - Patti Smith/Bruce Springsteen. "Madman across the Water"- Bernie Taupin/Elton John. "American Pie" - Don McClean. "Bat Out of Hell" - Jim Steinman/Meatloaf. "Jungleland" - Bruce Springsteen/The E Street Band. "Gimme the Sweet and Lowdown" - Mike Ness/Social Distortion. "Hi Ren" - Ren. That's poetry motherfuckers. Damn good poetry. It may not be your taste in poetry, but these are good stuff. By the way, that last song got me starting to write poetry again, after not writing hardly any poetry, for over 15 years. Thanks Ren.
Creation emanates, light from the sun
In every group that beholds there's one
-excerpt from one of my Lost Poems
In the big Substack post linked at the end of this blog post, you can read about how I started writing poetry in 1987-1988, sparked by my girlfriend at the time. I kept writing "song lyrics" after we broke up. Eventually I had 5 or 6 notebooks full of "lyrics," and knew I didn't intend to start a band. That's when I realized I had become a poet. That was in 1990 or 1991. In 1992, inspired by a book of Henry Rollins' poetry a roommate showed me, I published my first poetry zine. It had 80 or 100 of my poems in it, and the zine was so thick I had to bind each one with duct tape. For real. The zine was called, We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing. The first poem was called, "Journey of The White Bear," written the night that girlfriend who inspired me to try and write songs dumped me. When I published that poetry zine, I got tagged with the nickname, "The White Bear." I eventually took that as my penname for my poetry. I published two more, smaller, zines of poetry, Mush in 1996, and The Poet in 1997. Both of those had 30 or 35 poems each in them. Between the three zines, I self-published about 130-160 of the poems I wrote between 1988 and 1997.
The Key
I met a man with a golden key
He said, "Coincidence isn't
As you will see"
He plunged the key into a stream
And I realized all things flow from dreams
He held the key up to the sky
And I realized energy doesn't die...
Excerpt, all I can remember, from "The Key," one of my Lost Poems
I didn't stop writing poetry in 1997. I kept writing it through the years until late 2008. I wrote fewer poems, but they were better quality, overall. Most of them had something to do with trying to make sense with the trials and tribulations of life, and what we're all doing here on this crazy planet. My poems got longer, averaging 20 to 40 lines, I'd say, instead of maybe 10 to 20 lines, like many of the earlier poems.
In 2005, while working as a taxi driver, I got an offer to move into an actual indie art gallery, and live there during the week. The gallery, AAA Electra 99, was in an industrial unit in Anaheim at the time, and the owner was another taxi driver, who owned his cab. I lived in the gallery with a mama cat and six kittens, Monday morning through Friday afternoon, and drove his taxi on the weekends. After a couple of years of working seven days a week, 12-18 hours a day, in the taxi, it was a welcome break. I was totally burned out when I moved into the gallery. I hadn't done anything creative in two or three years. At all. I was completely focused on making money, as the taxi industry went into a downward spiral. Suddenly, in the gallery all week, I had a lot of time on my hands. I started drawing pictures with Sharpies after a few days, and my Sharpie Scribble Style drawing technique was born there in the gallery.
But I did something else as well. I had a Mac Powerbook laptop, and I started trying to teach myself Final Cut video editing software, so I could get up-to-date, and start making videos again. That didn't pan out. What I also did in the gallery was to go through all my notebooks, my personal journals, and to look through all the poems I had written from late 1997 through 2005. Out of over 200 poems, I had about 165 that I thought were solid poems. I typed them all into the hard drive of my computer, not sure what I was going to do with them. So I had the original, handwritten poems in all my journals, and digital copies in my Powerbook.
Mirror, Mirror
Mirror, mirror, on the wall
Why do you show the worst of all
Why can't you show who I could be
I look at you, but I see me
-The White Bear, excerpt from on of the Lost Poems
Since I was 19, I've published a lot of zines, written or had photos in 8 BMX magazines, wrote a newsletter for the AFA, worked on several TV show crews, made a bunch of BMX, skate and snowboard videos, and written over 2,800 blog posts. The highest quality creative work I've ever done was in the poems I wrote between 1997 and 2008. In 2007, because of health issues and lack of business, I walked away from taxi driving, and became fully homeless, in Orange County, California. I spent a year homeless in SoCal, and eventually took my family's offer to fly me to North Carolina. They thought I might be able to get going again there. My parents moved to NC 3 or 4 years after I moved out of their house, in San Jose, in 1986. My sister followed them east a couple of years later, and finished college there. She ended up meeting her future husband, and they married and settled down there. We're all from Ohio originally, so I had absolutely no connection to North Carolina, other than family members living there, and I didn't want to move there.
But the pressure that gets put on homeless people at times forced me out of California, much to my dismay. My family flew me to NC in the middle of November of 2008. Remember 2008? Yeah, not a good time to find a job, particularly in a place where you have no connections. The Great Recession (aka GFC or Global Financial Crisis) was in full collapse mode then.
I was promised a loan of about $150 to catch up my storage unit payments in Cali, and get my laptop out of the pawn shop, and have someone ship my stuff to me. when I went to NC. I flew there with a bookbag sized backpack, and that's it. All my BMX stuff, a Dyno race bike I'd been riding, all the raw footage and master tapes of videos I'd produced, all my BMX magazines (including a full set of FREESTYLIN' magazines), my videos and DVD's, and all the notebooks with originals of my poems, were in my 5' X 5' storage unit. That loan I'd been promised was quickly dismissed after getting to NC, and I had no way to come up with money there. I lost everything I owned, my entire BMX history, except for my Haro brake lever key chain. I went instantly into a deep depression.
What surprised me was that, of everything I lost, the poems were what bothered me the most. I stopped writing poetry. I couldn't find a job, and I lived with my parents at age 42, in a small two bedroom apartment, for a year or two. I couldn't get away from North Carolina for nearly ten years. I never did find a "real job" there. It was the spring of 2019 when I finally made it back home to California. I've lived in a couple dozen cities and towns in six states, but Southern California is the only place that ever felt like home to me. In 2008, in North Carolina, I stopped writing poetry. The poems just didn't seem to come anymore.
My sister had copies of two of my poem books, and she gave me those. Those got lost in another move in NC. That was totally my fault. So I've managed to lose all copies of the 150 or so poems I've published in zines, and the 165, much better quality poems, I wrote between late 1997 and 2008. I also lost well over 100 not-so-great poems that I wrote as well. So these few poems in the previous posts, and the handful I linked in the last post, are the few remaining poems I have, out of 400 to 500 I've written. So that's the story of my "Lost Poems."
The lesson here, if you do any kind of creative work of any decent quality, GET IT OUT IN PEOPLE'S HANDS, even if you have to give it away. It is possible to lose all your creative work. It happened to me.
Back in 2008, bored and severely depressed, and living in my parents' spare bedroom, in a tiny town in North Carolina, I had 24/7 access to a computer, and decent internet, for the first time in my life. For a couple weeks, I "surfed the web" and watched a ton of porn. Then I started blogging. Somewhere around 1,500 to 1,700 of the blog posts I've written since are in this blog, and spread across more that 25 other blogs, sitting out there, on the web. I've got over 200 original drawings and copies of drawings in many U.S. states, and over a dozen foreign countries. I haven't made a living doing all this work. I did it because I love doing, and this is what I do. This is who I am. I'll keep putting out the best work I can, for as long as I can, and hopefully make a living at it some day. Either way, I'll keep doing the best creative work I can in whatever situation I'm in.
I started spending my Pizza Hut pay to self-publish zines in 1985. It took until 2008, but I finally got over my Luddite-ism, and figured out how fucking cool the internet is. I've been using it the best I can to create pretty cool content ever since. I've made some money selling drawings, selling over 100 original drawings in the last 8 years. But what I've made is nowhere close to making a living. I'll keep plugging along at this as long as I'm able to. And I'll put out work for free, if that's the only way to get it out so some audience that may appreciate it. I'll make money at this work when I'm able to. That's what I learned by losing over 300 of the Lost Poems. When you do decent creative work, get it out to people, whether you get paid or not.
I recently wrote a big post on my Substack about poetry, and how I became a poet. If that sounds interesting, check it out.
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