Favorite Poet, once upon a time
Posted on | September 14, 2006 | 58 Comments
In my opinion (oh, don’t I have some! And it is not even ‘humble’) the only readers of poetry are wannabe poets and desperate lovers sniffing around to make off with a verse or two. The poetry public likes has already been made or is being made in to rock ballads and pop songs without help from any poet laureates.
Why did I read poetry? I was not a desperate lover, for I was the proverbial late bloomer. A wannabe poet then? A wannabe for sure, a poet – a grand illusion. I must have just crossed in to my teens, thumping through the pages of yellow moth eaten slim volumes of contemporary poetry, before deciding which one to take home. Some of these were as recent as 1967, which more or less marked the end of the period called contemporary in our neighborhood public library. That was as current as I could get in 1989 without straining my pocket.
And then I met him….. in a lonesome city, listening to the warm – Rod McKuen. Here was a man after my own heart. A poet singing love, loneliness, angst and all things in between. Reading McKuen was the closest I came to reading paperback romances, but it does not undermine the value of his works nor do I regret reading them, I enjoyed every secret bite I took of his poems. He was my first girlish crush in the world of words and had a permanent seat in my altar before T.S.Eliot unseated him some years later.
This former rodeo cowboy, lumberjack, cookie cutter, railroad worker, surveyor and US Army Infantryman in Korea (wonder whether they still make such renaissance men?) has sold 75 million copies of his books, translated into 28 languages world-wide. A poetic mouthpiece of the sixties flower children, McKuen has recorded 215 albums of original music, 67 went platinum and 115 gold. McKuen’s songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists from Frank Sinatra to Madonna and from Barbra Streisand and the Boston Pops to The Kingston Trio.(Thanks, Wiki)
Critics say he has no rhyme or rhythm, it is prose faking as poetry. Who cared, back then I enjoyed it. I hate the maze of metaphors, or in the present day, the overuse of thesaurus. Poetry should be simple, understandable and from the heart. If someone blames McKuen of being self centered, for pimping his life, I pity him/her – isn’t a person an agglomeration of his experiences and some scattered leaves of memory in someone else’s scrapbook when s/he is dead?
Looking back, most of the McKuen stuff I had once liked with their recurring love-loneliness-sex themes seems cheesy for my now evolved, refined senses(or so I’d like to think), but once upon a time they did serve my girly teenage spirit just right.
Turned out that the first city which became my home in US is also a favorite muse of McKuen. Here’s a McKuen poem about a street I had walked, at the corner of the hippydom’s Mecca – Haight, in San Francisco, there’s Stanyan Street and other sorrows….
And now unable to sleep
because the day is finally coming home
because your sleep has locked me out
I watch you and wonder at you.
I know your face by touch when it’s dark
I know the profile of your sleeping face
the sound of you sleeping.
… I have total recall of you
and Stanyan Street
because I know it will be important later.
It’s quiet now.
Only the clock
moving toward rejection tomorrow
breaks the stillness.
-Rod McKuen, from Stanyan Street and other Sorrows
Not earth shattering, not even poetry by many people’s standards, but somehow those lines got me started on writing and has led to this day that you’ve to endure my blog.
My current favorite poets(English or translated to English, excl. Malayalam and Hindi – they’d require another post) are Rilke, Eliot, Akhmatova, Neruda and Vikram Seth. Who are your favorites? Gimme a bite of their words, if you can.
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58 Responses to “Favorite Poet, once upon a time”
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September 20th, 2006 @ 5:17 AM
Try Richard Brautigan too…
Our Beautiful West Coast Thing
We are a coast people
There is nothing but ocean out beyond us.
— Jack Spicer
I sit here dreaming
long thoughts of California
at the end of a November day
below a cloudy twilight
near the Pacific
listening to The Mamas and The Papas
THEY’RE GREAT
singing a song about breaking
somebody’s heart and digging it!
I think I’ll get up
and dance around the room.
Here I go!
September 20th, 2006 @ 5:17 AM
Try Richard Brautigan too…
Our Beautiful West Coast Thing
We are a coast people
There is nothing but ocean out beyond us.
— Jack Spicer
I sit here dreaming
long thoughts of California
at the end of a November day
below a cloudy twilight
near the Pacific
listening to The Mamas and The Papas
THEY’RE GREAT
singing a song about breaking
somebody’s heart and digging it!
I think I’ll get up
and dance around the room.
Here I go!
September 20th, 2006 @ 5:12 PM
There might be something to that.
September 20th, 2006 @ 5:12 PM
There might be something to that.
September 22nd, 2006 @ 9:34 PM
Aha..don’t remember that, might not have caught on the similarity then since I didn’t know Nash’s writings.
My reason for pointing out the Nash influence is due to your one-liner wisecrack entries.
September 22nd, 2006 @ 9:34 PM
Aha..don’t remember that, might not have caught on the similarity then since I didn’t know Nash’s writings.
My reason for pointing out the Nash influence is due to your one-liner wisecrack entries.
September 22nd, 2006 @ 9:39 PM
For me it is kind of hard to believe that a person who considers poetry beautiful would’ve gone through life without composing even two lines of verse, atleast a secret ode when s/he was at the vulnerable most to their own muse?! Don’t know.
September 22nd, 2006 @ 9:39 PM
For me it is kind of hard to believe that a person who considers poetry beautiful would’ve gone through life without composing even two lines of verse, atleast a secret ode when s/he was at the vulnerable most to their own muse?! Don’t know.