Wednesday
25th June, 2008
New concerts announced!
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July autograph signing
event.
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A Thought for Today
Don’t be chained by your beliefs – be liberated by them.
This
One Does It For Me!
Ken,
I can't believe I've found this site - Rod McKuen, after all these
years!!! How wonderful.
I've checked some of the archives (it will take awhile to make my way
through all of them) and so far I haven't found anything from my
favorite book "Too Many Midnights."
Do you plan to publish anything from this book in the future?
Thanks for making my year.
Sheila Coutts
Thanks for your note, Sheila, and welcome to A Safe Place to Land. Hope
you'll be with us for a long time to come.
We most certainly have published excerpts from Too Many Midnights from
time to time. You can access them by simply entering the name into our
Google search engine, the link for which you'll find at the foot of this
page.
Meantime here's the introduction to the book along with the title poem.
Author’s Note - Too Many Midnights
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’ pleases 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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George Abbott o
Ron Bryant o
Clifton Chenier o
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Peter Lind Hayes o
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Carly Simon o
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Scott Terra o
Arthur Tracy o
Jimmie "J.J." Walker |
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The sea’s a leveler of dreams and destiny.
Hills have never worried me, it’s the valley’s that are traitorous.
Be sorry on your own time. Why drag down the forward hiker or the runner in her stride?
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TOO MANY MIDNIGHTS |
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Alone, I’ve
watched the midnights go
two, three, five, sometimes ten or more
in a ragged, rusty, ugly row.
Ragged because without a sharing
midnight has no special form.
The clock will tick it off
as only one more minute
in yet another uneventful hour.
Rusty, because not even golden moons
appear as gold when seen through spyglasses
or the single naked eye.
Ugly, because one man’s thoughts on beauty
make no sense unless explained aloud,
half aloud or with no words at all
to some one else.
It is my belief that in my life
there are too many midnights
and yet not stars enough
within the midnight sky
to wish upon.
But I have never been
a man who followed his beliefs
to self-distortion
or disputed them enough
that left behind
they become unrecognizable.
So I have not deserted
that night sky yet
though deep inside me
is an ache, a bend however slight,
that pleads and even orders me
to cast my eyes toward the ground
away from yet another hopeless hope.
An ache
is just an ache
and nothing more
and I will not be
ordered to give in by pain
or even lack of progress.
I defy a headache
or a stomach grumble
to order me away from hope.
The most that I am willing
to bargain over
is a halving of the midnights
exploring some, ignoring others.
Even then the risk is great.
Suppose I miss a certain helping star,
one willing to be runner for me
explainer of my dark desire
to that one who knots my tongue
when I, myself, try putting words
that work together ?
The chance for that to happen
is a chance I cannot, will not
abrogate to pain’s decision.
Though pain pulls me,
it is but one end
of this tangled tug-of-war.
Night insists as much
and as the midnights pass
and show no sign of slowing
I’ll reach out and catch one
by the neck or tail
once I’m sure someone is here
to savor and to share it with me.
I am not sad,
sorry for myself,
nor do I feel cheated.
But you and all the stars
as you go traveling
will not meet another man
more impatient
or closer to the starting gate.
- from "Too Many Midnights," 1981 |
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