I've had quite some value out of Rod McKuen's work
which I first encountered thirty years ago. Sticking
in the mind ever since have been his 'disillusioned
moth' and the mystical yellow unicorn
glimpsed chewing the leaves of a linden tree. The
picture of the blue fisherman is another lasting image
and the lover whom McKuen observes 'bent in embryo
sleep' while the clock 'moves towards rejection'.
I also bear in mind that, as this former writer of
propaganda scripts in the Korean War observes,
the biggest heroes are the people who sell bright
red seat belts in the highway war.
McKuen, like any poet, has his universal observations
cobbled from his own tissues and existence, his own
themes, which he returns to all the time--pets, funny
little objects out of everyday life, brand names, the
beach, the sun, singers' or actors' details, the
lonely room, travel and above all the
need for love and warmth (coupled with the
desire to escape, to run free of strings).
These ideas are not new--but McKuen treats
them with a pastel sensibility of his own, in clear
and straightforward verse that doesn't
strain for effect. Here is a writer who
moves us, when so many poets, so-called, seem
are powerless to arouse any feeling at all. The only
comment that would arise after a look-through of
the pages of some of them would be: 'let them get
on with it.'
There can't be many published poets who have strapped
on a six-gun in a Western movie. Why McKuen didn't go
on from 'Wild Heritage' (1958) to make more Westerns, maybe
a TV series, I don't know. It's true the character he
played was somewhat reluctant to draw. There is also
the massive musical involvement, composing, conducting,
arranging--SINGING (just like the bards of old).
McKuen's experience, which incorporates large
dollops of showbiz razmatazz, has
to be different from that of those in the workaday
world who hope their bardism will lift them out of
the rut.
It occurred to me thirty years back while reading
Virgil, Catullus and the rest for seminars and McKuen
(amongst others) in my own time that the man, a
real poet and maker who put a whole, real
and consistent world into place which, in
that form, hadn't been there before, was well in the tradition
of the love elegists such as Propertius and Propertius's idol
Callimachus.
McKuen's words must have been quoted by many lovers to
their idols. I know I've used Stanyan Street and
Other Sorrows as a guide book, a modern
Art of Love, and offered young ladies,
for lack of a better, a trip around the room.
One girl kept my first copy of Listen to the Warm
and never saw me again. She must have regarded it as
payment for an afternoon of kisses.
There must be thousands of us who still quote McKuen lines
today. One of my favourite card injunctions to my
sweetie-pie is 'Sleep warm.' This is all in the
tradition of Propertius and Ovid and
all the other love elegists, who could see their
volumes lying on a footstool in the boudoir alongside
the make-up and the mirror.
As a theatre orderly at the hospital I was in a position to
notice on the wards that The Rod McKuen Omnibus made
a great gift for the wife or girlfriend along with flowers
and chocolates.
People who know very little about modern poetry
and read less but consider all the same that
they have adequate intellectual credentials find it easy to
sniff at McKuen's allegedly lightweight and throwaway verse.
The implication is that it's the sort of thing everybody
writes at some time of crisis in their life,
maundering like, but once out of adolescence
decent chaps then use these scribblings to
light their boilers in the morning.
They can have their easy victory in their own lunchtimes--
no one needs to jump up and champion the millionaire bard.
He has and will always have readers.
Auden once paid an ambiguous compliment
when he said Rod McKuen's poems were letters to the
world and he was happy that many of them had come to
him and found him out. To which McKuen riposted
quite elegantly that in that case he hoped more of
his letters went astray.