Rod McKuen (1933-2015)  notes by Ira Maine Esq, Poetry Editor

Even though I was there, in London, in the Swinging Sixties, I had never heard of the above mentioned poet. McKuen sold 60 million!!! books of poetry worldwide in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. He wrote songs for Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Perry Como and many others. He wrote film sound tracks, classical music and was astonishingly successful. OK, so McKuen was American, I’ll grant you, but I had heard of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and other Beat poets, who were not at all in McKuen’s earnings bracket. So what happened here? How did I miss out on this literary phenomenon? Well now…

It turns out that Mr McKuen’s poetry was slaughtered by the literary intelligentsia. He was variously described as the ‘King of Schmaltz’ and his work as ‘ adolescent claptrap’. He was not well regarded by those who position themselves as arbiters of literary good taste. Well, perhaps they were right (in intellectual terms) but his work appealed so hugely to the man in the street that his poetry has been translated into eleven different languages!

 McKuen wrote for a vast, highly appreciative audience and he can thumb his nose at the critics who scorned him. Who cares if his work produces patronizing sniggers in the groves of academe? His work is about love, its highs and lows and the warmth and pleasure of relationships. He never pretended it was anything else and was damned for it.

“How dare you write poetry that appeals to the common man!’ they screeched. ‘How dare you write poetry that people can easily understand! What has happened to obscurity? Where’s the impenetrable in all this? Schmaltz, that’s all it is, schmaltz!’

Here is a poem of McKuen’s entitled ‘Advance/Retreat’ which has not a whiff of schmaltz about it. It has, however a whiff of homosexuality but who gives a bugger about that? Love is the same, no matter what, unchanging and eternal.