Wednesday 19th October, 2005
Rod in Concert
Holland, December 2005!
San Sebastian Strings
albums now available on CD! Order
now!
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A Thought for Today
The inner ear hears
music and that’s enough.
This
One Does It For Me!
Dear Ken,
You always manage to find words to poems or lyrics for other people and
I hope you can do the same for me.
A poem of Rod's I found most inspirational had the words "a glass then
if you please" and had something to do with toasting ourselves as human
beings.
I'd love to have those words again one day.
Can you help?
Margaret Cunningham
I'd love to take the credit for finding words to long forgotten songs and
poems, Margaret, but that accolade is reserved for Jay Hagan, a.k.a.
Captain America, who has, over the years, painstakingly captured in
digital format just about every word Rod has ever written. His database
is a source I use every day of my life and this web site would not exist
without it. Thanks again, Jay.
The words you quote, and
accurately at that, are taken from a poem entitled "A Toast" which
appeared in the 1981 book "Too Many Midnights." Here's more about the
book and you'll find the poem at the foot of the page.
Author’s Note
This book comes after a long year of work. Work that has taken me to
several countries - including two trips from America to Australia.
After many stops and starts, I had finally finished Too Many Midnights
more than thirteen months ago... yet seeing the finished manuscript when
I returned to New York in January 1981, I decided I felt differently
about what I had originally written.
On re-reading the work, the final version seemed very ‘down’ to me. I’m
not sure why. But I decided to start again. Whether any writer feels
completely good about something he commits to paper... a collection of
work already published or the newest child emerging from his typewriter
( in this case, both circumstances apply ) is doubtful. But this is a
better book than the first - as the next anthology will be better still,
and I can live with this collection with a certain unexplainable ease.
Too Many Midnights takes love apart - but unlike some things I have
done, it puts it back together again. I’m pleased with that. I like the
way the new title poem works, and ‘Whistle Stops Revisited’ please me
enough to want to include yet another version of it in a book I’m
working on for Simon & Schuster entitled The Beautiful Strangers.
The poem about Edna St. Vincent Millay was written with love and
dedicated to my editor, Margaret Blackstone.
I have included for the first time in a paperback anthology two poems
that readers have long requested, ‘Now I Have the Time’ and part of
‘Stanyan Street’. Still it seems to me that this anthology includes more
new work than any of the five previously published by Pocket Books.
Rod McKuen, March 1981
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