Verses of Wandering Poet Are Odes to the Half-Full Glass

Like the proprietor of an old-time medicine show, Bruce Sievers of Hermosa Beach packs the tools of his trade in a neat aluminum suitcase and travels hundreds of miles each month. He visits towns large and small, performing for groups such as the Depression Glass Society, the Mayflower Descendants and the Mothers of Twins.

After each show, Sievers sets up shop. For $5 apiece, he sells his elixirs: booklets with such titles as “Happiness Attracts Happiness,” “How Can I Say Forever?” and “An American in Love With His Country.”

They are booklets of poetry. They make people happy. And, like the powders and balms of the medicine man, they sell.

Bruce Sievers earns his living--all of it--as a traveling poet.

Although he will not divulge figures, a 1981 People magazine account says he sold 25,000 poetry booklets, calendars and cassettes in 1980 and grossed $150,000. Sievers says he averages $200 a performance, although he can earn up to $2,000 for a big convention.

He works eight months a year and, during busy periods, his manager books him for three performances a day, six days a week. He says he is so much in demand that he sometimes turns down work for lack of time.

“It’s a good living,” is as specific as he will get.

Sievers is not, however, a Blake or a Frost or a Longfellow. His verses will never be found in a bookstore, nor will they ever be critically acclaimed. Once, Sievers sent a booklet to a college professor for a critique. The professor skewered him, and although the poet was hurt at first, he now finds himself agreeing with the assessment.

“It’s exactly what that guy said--trivial, trite, hackneyed,” he said. “But if, in order to be accepted by them, I have to write the way they do, I’d rather not be accepted.”

Sievers’ work is much like what one might find on a greeting card. In fact, he once wrote an entire line of greeting cards--60 or 70 poems--in an afternoon, although he never sold them. He said he was able to write them so quickly because, unlike much of the rest of his work, the greeting-card poems did not rhyme.

There are no depressing thoughts in Sievers’ work; Sievers says he prefers to think of a glass as half full, rather than half empty. There are no big words; Sievers says he never liked high-brow poetry because he never understood it. In fact, he rarely reads high-brow poetry and went to his first formal poetry reading several weeks ago.

Sievers found the poetry too obscure and they weren’t all that crazy about his. When Sievers read his verses on friendship and patriotism, one woman bowed her head and smirked. Afterward, Sievers skipped out early.

“It seems that the way some people write, they’ve got a thesaurus in one hand and a dictionary is the other. . . . I think that poetry should not be snobbish.”

He calls his work “simple poetry.”

Here, for example, are Sievers’ thoughts on friendship:

A friendship is a pact that you

never offend . . .

it began when we met and it may

never end . . .

and I give you a part of my life.

My mind will be with you though

we’re miles apart . . .

remembering times that made you

a part of my heart . . .

and our problems were only a

trifle.

For his work--especially the patriotic “An American in Love With His Country,” Sievers has been praised by Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Reagan, as well as several U. S. senators.

One wall in his office at home in Hermosa Beach is covered with photographs of famous people to whom he has read or sent his work, among them Groucho Marx, Henry Winkler and Ann-Margret.

However, most important to Sievers are the audiences who love his impassioned readings.

His work is written to be heard, and his listeners often tell him afterward that he puts into words emotions that they feel but cannot express.

Poetic Gush

On a recent night at a Marina del Rey restaurant, Sievers spoke to about 20 members of the Santa Monica chapter of the Business and Professional Women’s Club. The audience, mostly middle-aged, gushed over Sievers--especially his readings of two poems about his love for his wife and how he watched her give birth to his two sons.

(He neglected to tell them that he is divorced now and shares custody of his children. “It doesn’t really fit into the program,” he said later.)

He sold $165 worth of booklets after the reading. One of his admirers, Sigria Larson of Santa Monica, leaned over as she asked for an autograph. “We should have a million more like you,” she cooed.

If a poet conjures up the image of a bespectacled, frail intellectual, Sievers does not look the part.

With a thick mustache and sandy hair that falls below his collar, Sievers is an athletic 6-foot-2 and 200 pounds.

Verse on the Infield

He looks more like a baseball player than a writer. And though playing professional baseball was his childhood dream, the closest he came to the roar of a stadium crowd was the time he read one of his poems at the opening of a California Angels-Oakland A’s game. He got a standing ovation.

Sievers, who turns 40 this year, has been reciting his poetry for 17 years. The Westchester native started writing in 1970, during a cross-country hitchhiking trek he took after serving in a Green Beret training program and joining the Army reserve.

He set out angry and frustrated by the rigidity of the military, he says, but became charmed with small-town America. He began writing his thoughts out of boredom, he says, and later began rhyming his writings.

When he returned home with no job, he decided to take his act on the road. Although friends call him Bruce, he decided then to use his full name--James Bruce Joseph Sievers--for his work, because he thought being a poet named Bruce sounded too effeminate.

Success did not come quickly, but it came--so much so that Sievers and his brother eventually bought a printing company that they used to publish his poetry. Sievers has since sold his half of the business to his brother and has his work published elsewhere--not because they had a falling out, but because he found another company that prints his verse cheaper.

What’s in store for Bruce Sievers? He says his goal--although he is fairly certain he will never achieve it--is to become poet laureate of the United States, a post previously held by such notables as Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur.

His explanation is much like the simple philosophy he dispenses in his poems.

“Remember that poem I wrote about friendship?” he asked. “That friend of of mine, he told me something. He said, ‘Pick something in your life so far away that you could never reach it. That way, it gives you something to strive for the rest of your life. And whether you reach it or not, it’s not important. It’s the trip that’s important.’ ”