11th & 12th October, 2007

Rod at Dos Vidas. Photo by Thomas Kist from the 2006 Arjan Vlakveld film “Rod McKuen: A Man Alone” for Netherlands Public Television. Photo ©2006, 2007 by Stanyan Audio Video Archives. All Rights Reserved.

A Thought for Today

Don't compete. You're lesser than no man and none are better. All creatures, beings, people are alike. How can you compete, win or lose a race, with someone other than yourself? Being you is hard enough, but someone other? Never.

FROM the¨BOOKS

WHERE WILL I REDISCOVER YOU?
December 11, 1989

Where will I rediscover you
                            and will I?
The question sits on all the lips of those
who lie in bed alone. You is/are the name
each of us give to what we love the most
      or what we have not, will not know. 

And it is almost always that One, absent,
Gone, through circumstance 
                       or happenstance.
Where did I lose you and when? Did it
Happen even as we knew we were 
discovering each other that first time. 
Was loss a piece of swelling 
              big as the enlarging heart?

Sweet basil growing greener reaches up
and through the grass like weeds. 
Mallards form a rope across the sky
coming from the south in secret.
Cinnamon Teal bring up the rear.

An early thaw has made all canyons
                          into rivulets.
The daisies saying love me now
                          or love me not.
If I have thought about you more than
now it must have been some other me
    living in a different heartbreak house
surrounded by some other hedge of memory.

I have been to town and back, to Greece
in dreams and in reality. To far shore,
near field, streets between and always I
have sought you out; on yellow days in
yellowed pages, through rages of the mind
and heart. I do not start out on a trip to
corner or beyond without you for you 
have never left my head or would be heart.

Where will I come upon you, if I do?
Perhaps in death or life again. When?
Perhaps not ever, what then? I'll give
It another day, a week. Another month.
A lifetime more or less, then I'll give up.

- from "A Safe Place to Land"

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ROD McKUEN CONCERTS

ROD McKUEN APPEARANCES

Thursday 11 October

Catlin Adams o Joseph Alsop o Art Blakey o Steen Steensen Blicher o Zev Bufman o Joan Cusak o Dawn French o Martha Graham o Daryl Hall o Henry John Heinz o Sawao Kato o Ron Leibman o Elmore Leonard o Franz Liszt o Luke Perry o Charles Revson o Jerome Robbins o Eleanor Roosevelt o Michelle Trachtenberg o Dottie West o Sir George Williams o Steve Young

Friday 12 October

Susan Anton o Kirk Cameron o Joe Cronin o Coral Drouyn o Edward VI o Sid Fernandez o Milo Frank o Dick Gregory o Hugh Jackman o Marion Jones o Daliah Lavi o Sally Little o Perle Mesta o Luciano Pavarotti o Adam Rich o Joan Rivers o Martie Seidel o Al Smith o Chris Wallace o Ralph Vaughn Williams

There will be times when many will want pieces of you, but only offer up the whole.

Perspective comes when poles are far enough apart to have horizons at both ends.

TURNING POINT

-from "Come To Me in Silence," 1973