Q&A with Steve Roggenbuck

Poet Steve Roggenbuck is a polarizing figure to those in the know. He eschews traditional tenets of grammar and spelling (his website URL, for example, is www.livemylief.com), he sometimes rambles non-sensically, his often nasally delivery on his numerous YouTube videos can grate and detractors paint him as a self-aggrandizing figure who cares more about search engine results than the art it links to.

To others he is a community facilitator, a selfless messenger who left an MFA program to travel across the continent and spends his days ‘boosting’ others around him, wearing Walt Whitman and ee cummings on his figurative sleeve in an effort to reach as broad of an audience as possible. The New York Times recently suggested he was perhaps the first 21st Century Poet and countless Tumblrites have listed him as a prominent member of the ‘alt lit’ community.

Buried deep within his musings is a mission, a call to arms. Take one of his most-watched YouTube videos. Entitled “make something beautiful before you are dead,” Roggenbuck references Dog The Bounty Hunter, Pinterest, ABC Family and Marxism within the first minute of his video, as if he were loosely stringing together a series of absurdist observations. At the two-minute mark, however, Roggenbuck suddenly starts in on his manifesto, urging people to action, reminding them of their humanity and its limited timespan. In the space of three minutes, Roggenbuck goes from loopy to fixating, a shift he utilizes to maximum efficiency. He can be poignant or downright silly, but he can never be classified as boring.

Roggenbuck talked to Cult MTL about his transition from unhappy student to traveling poet, from content consumer to content producer. Oh, and he also offers you social media neophytes some tips on how to gain traction.

Brian Hastie: You left your MFA degree in order to pursue a different path and have since been touring North America. What was the decision (or decisions) behind leaving academia and at what point did you realize you could make traveling while pursuing your boosted lifestyle a reality?

Steve Roggenbuck: The MFA was never a great fit for me, I wasn’t interested in much of my coursework, I did very little reading for my classes, I was frustrated with some of the teachers especially. I stayed in the program because of expectations from my girlfriend and parents to pursue teaching as a career so I could make a middle-class income within a few years. When I broke up with my girlfriend last fall, there wasn’t much holding me to the MFA anymore. I realized I could stay with my dad rent-free and just blog full-time, or — what I ended up doing — I could travel and stay with friends rent-free.

BH: I’d imagine traveling alone must have its ups and downs. How do you cope with the loneliness that may be associated with a sort of vagabond lifestyle, or do you feel as though digital interactions would weigh the same as IRL?

SR: The loneliness can be hard. Lately I’m really just trying to focus on the upsides of this lifestyle. You know, hardly anyone gets to live this way. I try to keep that perspective in the front of my mind. In Justin Bieber’s movie Never Say Never, when Justin complains about not having a normal life, his voice trainer tells him, “You gave up normal. This is your new normal.” I try to remember that I chose this whole path. This is how I get to be creative and inspire people full time. It’s a whole different set of pros and cons, but I actively chose this path, and I would continue to choose it.

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