Back in the 1960s I knew very few Beat chicks, or later Hippie birds, who didn't have a crush on McKuen and his records in which he read his prosy personal conversationally lyric poems. And though I hated to admit it, when some young woman would insist on playing Stanyan Street or Listen To The Warm, I'd pretend to be too hip for it but would actually be moved.
The man had a voice that expressed his take on the dailiness of loneliness and love sickness better than a lot of more technically brilliant poets of the time. And he was a prize-winning composer and song writer. He had enormous popular success but was mostly dismissed by the academy and the book critics and his fellow poets.
Here's a great story about the poet and writer Aram Saroyan's encounter with McKuen when Aram was a young man. Goodnight Rod, you deserved to have been treated better by your poet peers, but at least you had a worldwide audience that loved you.
6 comments:
Thanks, Michael. Nice take! Cheers, Aram
and thanks for your post that I linked to, concise and honest as always
Yep, that *was* a great article, especially the bit with Jann Wenner doing the mental calcualtions as to whether or not an article on McKuen would work in RS.
And I'm once again glad to have never gotten involved in the surprisngly viscious poetry world.
Thanks, Lal & Aram, for these reflections & honesty: at least poets can be honest if they can't get anything else (you would think). I appreciate you pushing my lazy assumptions: McKuen was popular when I was a little too young to be interested, & I suppose I wouldn't have liked him anyway as a young poet busy recoiling from anything that seemed corny or sentimental, in case anybody thought *I* was corny or sentimental. Love to you both, Elinor
Thanks, Lal & Aram, for these reflections & honesty: at least poets can be honest if they can't get anything else (you would think). I appreciate you pushing my lazy assumptions: McKuen was popular when I was a little too young to be interested, & I suppose I wouldn't have liked him anyway as a young poet busy recoiling from anything that seemed corny or sentimental, in case anybody thought *I* was corny or sentimental. Love to you both, Elinor
Michael:
I posted the following on the web-page you linked to Saroyan's essay.
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I had a friend in junior high school named Mike Ewbank. Mike liked Mad Magazine, Creature Features, folk singers, and comedians. He told jokes endlessly and played the bongos. He wasn't popular in school because he had terrible acne and red-face. He was an Irish kid, and I loved his company. This was in the late 1950's-early 60's.
He thought Rod McKuen was terrific. I'd never read his stuff, but wasn't very impressed by it. I thought Rupert Brooke and E.E. Cummings were pretty cool, but I really knew nothing about poetry in those days.
Later, when I was teaching English literature in college, the odd student would approach me to tell me how good Rod McKuen was. I tried to be gentle, but I thought McKuen wasn't what I was supposed to be teaching those kids. His poems seemed unrelievedly sad, and vague, and simplistic. I wanted the kids to respond to vividness, specificity, and strong rhetoric. Alas, some of them actually preferred McKuen's poetry.
I'm not going to put down McKuen. There's an audience for every kind of writing. Rap artists have theirs. Minimalists have theirs. McKuen would never be important to me, but if people want to read his books, that's fine.
Now he's gone. His work seems in retrospect to be characteristic of a whole era of American culture--an era that's now history. McKuen probably had more in common with Ginsberg and Brautigan, than either of them did with the so-called "official verse culture" that Charles Bernstein talks about.
We don't know what posterity is going to make of McKuen's poetry. Has his collected poems ever been published?
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