ONE SATURDAY WHEN I was in tenth grade, as I made my circuit around the Warwick Mall, a book caught my eye in the window at Waldenbooks. Slim, with an electric-blue cover and yellow and white letters that reminded me of a Peter Max poster, it read Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows in yellow, and above it, in white, the name Rod McKuen. Beside it was another Rod McKuen book, Lonesome Cities. Also slim, with a moody gray cover of clouds and, in the same psychedelic typeface, the title in hot pink. I went inside the bookstore, and picked up Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows.
“The words within these pages are for music,” the inside flap read. “They sing of love lost and found and lost again. They are hymns to the dying, sonnets to the summer and verses of the joy of being wanted—even for a night.” All of the poems were written by Rod McKuen, the flap said, one of the finest chansonniers in the country. Later, of course, back at home, I went directly to my Reader’s Digest dictionary and looked up the word “chansonnier”: a poet-songwriter, solitary singer, who sang his or her own songs. But standing there with that book in my hand, it only mattered that I was holding a book of poetry, a book that spoke of dying and summer and loneliness, the very things that I paced my room worrying about at night.
The poems themselves were slight, most just two or three short stanzas. But they were so profound, I thought. They weren’t like the few we’d read in school, which though I’d loved their rhythm and rhyme were formal and complicated. These poems by Rod McKuen seemed to speak directly to me, perhaps directly to every teenager in 1970. “Sometimes I think people were meant to be strangers . . .” Why at the tender age of fourteen I felt so lonely and alienated I cannot say. But when Paul Simon sang, “I am a rock, I am an island,” my heart screamed, “I am too!” And when Rod McKuen wrote about not getting close to others to avoid damaging your heart, it sounded like he had read what was in my heart.
I knew nothing of love, having only kissed a boy once at the Rocky Point amusement park the summer before. But I believed what Rod McKuen wrote: “I know that love is worth all the time it takes to find.” “Think of that,” he said, “when all the world seems made of . . . empty pockets.” I too would be “content to live on the sound your stomach makes,” content to eat “marmalade and oysters for breakfast.” “If you keep the empty heart alive a little longer / love will come. / It always does . . .” he wrote in “Some Thoughts for Benson Green on His 27th Birthday.” Yes! I thought as I read. I could keep my empty heart alive!
In “Spring Song” he asked: “Where were you when I was growing up and needed somebody?” Standing in that Waldenbooks, I began to weep when I read that line. As much as I’d loved to carefully write the rhyme patterns on poems at school and to ponder their meanings, Rod McKuen’s free-form poems made me feel like he was whispering secrets to me. I memorized the simile that ended “State Beach”—“the rain comes down like tears”—and wrote it in my purple lined notebook with all the other snippets of songs and sentences I collected there.
I don’t remember how much the book cost, surely no more than six or seven dollars, but whatever it cost was too expensive for me. Instead, every Saturday when I went to the mall, I stood memorizing the poems in Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows, and later in Listen to the Warm and Lonesome Cities. Even now, long after I’ve learned better poems, long after I’ve fallen in love with E. E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, I can still recite Rod McKuen’s poem “Ellen’s Eyes”: “All the space is taken up / remembering Ellen’s eyes.”
FROM THE DISTANCE of so many decades, I understand the appeal to a yearning, dreamy young girl of a chansonnier who wrote about the beach and the rain, both of which remain important to me. I even understand how all that loneliness spoke to me, a girl who felt alone in the world in which she lived. But I see too how those poems reflected my yearning to leave my familiar world. And in 1970, when teenagers left home, they went to San Francisco. The Summer of Love had been just the year before, and magazines and newspapers printed photographs of hippies every day, long-haired girls with flowers in their hair and blue-jeaned barefoot boys in Haight-Ashbury. Even a group as seemingly benign as the Cowsills sang about loving the flower girl, who sits smiling in the rain with flowers in her hair—Flowers everywhere!
Part of what seduced me on that long-ago Saturday afternoon at the Warwick Mall was the poetry of Kearny Street and Sausalito, of hills and fog, of San Francisco. Years later, when I went to San Francisco for the first time, I got a map from the hotel concierge and had him point out Stanyan Street to me. Then I made my way there, to Haight-Ashbury and that street lined with Victorian houses. All of the girls who wore flowers in their hair were long gone by then, and Stanyan Street looked very different from what I’d imagined. Yet when I looked up at the street sign with its name on it, I remembered the poem of that name: “I have total recall of you and Stanyan Street because I know it will be important later . . .”
How could I know all those years ago how important these words and Paul Simon’s and Ogden Nash’s and that afternoon when the world broke open and I learned about onomatopoeia would be? How all of these things, these poems, turned me into a lover of language and its infinite joys. Pop! Boom! In that moment on Stanyan Street, I saw that girl standing in that bookstore in that mall, clutching a slim neon-blue volume of poems that promised someday she would fall in love, be loved, and find herself in San Francisco. Even that young girl knew that such is the power of poetry, a gift that stayed with her the rest of her life.
Lesson 7: How to Be Curious
? A Stone for Danny Fisher BY HAROLD ROBBINS ?