Bruce Sievers

When last we saw OC's nicest Republican poet—Bob Dornan once showed up to read poetry with him—he was being boosted as a candidate for Poet Laureate.

It was nothing new for Sievers. The late Barry Goldwater used to nominate him for Poet Laureate every two years; Pat Boone took over where Goldwater left off.

Sievers is a very nice—if Hallmarkian—poet from Huntington Beach. He still commands a presence among conservative poetry aficionados and hasn't got much time for serious poetry.

"I'm not familiar with Stanley Kunitz," says Sievers when asked about the 92-year-old "people's poet" who was appointed mere weeks ago, nor is he a big fan of former Laureate Robert Pinskey. "I like some of his stuff, but he was hard for me to understand," he says. "I'm not enough of an art person to understand the genius of Picasso."

And really, Sievers is busy enough without an honorific that, frankly, he'll never get. He's busily reading around Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley—at Kiwanis and Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce—and working on a book of poems about such sports legends as Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Muhammed Ali and Wayne Gretzky.

So, yeah, Sievers isn't Poet Laureate material. Not by a long shot. But he's having fun and making money doing it, so that'sall right, and he's still one of the nicest guys _we've met.

"I get to make my living with my hobby," he says. "It's really nice. I get invited to parties and get paid for it. They paid me to meet Groucho Marx before he died! I would have sold my house for that!"