SOME OF THE BEST
16 July, 1998 |
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Rod & Sunny: Photo by Bob Gentry
8/5/1999
A Thought for Today
Never settle for less than more.
"Rod: You have written a lot on writing and the writing
experience. This is one of my favorites. Any thoughts of combining all your thoughts about writing in a single book?
Yolanda"
Hmm, that's a thought, Rod
ON POETRY
Poetry is elastic, but it should be concise . . .a very tight rubber band that won't break when stretched. Not only is it a poet's duty to chronicle his life as he sees it in relationship to the world around him, but more important a poet is a keeper of the language. Not yesterdays or tomorrows, but the language of now. My poetry cannot be judged against those poets who have gone before me or even my contemporaries. I am the poem. The poem is me. No one can safely tell me what my poems should be or should have been, because I lived them. They are my feelings and my experiences and must stand as such. If you
read a poem of mine and identify with it, then the poem becomes your experience. You will live it your own way - read into it
something I probably never meant to say. That is as it should be.
Auden once told me that my poems were 'letters to the world' and he was 'happy that many of them had come to him and found him out'. If that is so and there are others out there expecting mail, I hope more of my letters go astray.
-from the introduction to The Rod McKuen Omnibus, 1975.
First published in Flight Plan 7/16/98
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