Poet and critic Stephanie Burt describes Rod McKuen’s fame as “some combination of Rupi Kaur, Jimmy Kimmel, and Ed Sheeran…He was really that level of everyone knows who this person is.”
But who was Rod McKuen? A pop poet, folk musician, actor, and an entrepreneur with a legacy that ended up at Goodwill? He claimed he created the slogan “Make Love, Not War” while serving in Korea? On numerous occasions he claimed he had children somewhere—in France? Was he a natural-born storyteller or was he a “storyteller”? Did Richard Hell rip off Mckuen’s “The Beat Generation” with his “The Blank Generation”? And why didn’t Rod McKuen just come out as gay? Even in his obituary, important facts of his life are obscured, strangely: his partner, Edward McKuen Habib, is identified as his “half-brother.” Yet McKuen did speak out for gay rights, protesting the 1977 anti-gay campaign led by Anita Bryant, and releasing the song “Don’t Drink the Orange Juice” to align with the boycott of Florida’s oranges. Who was Rod McKuen? He was “all too accessible” writes the New York Review of Books. All too accessible, yet he resists narrative clarity. Maybe his story was unstable in ways beyond his ability to tell the story. For instance, sometimes I say I’m my daughter’s stepmother and sometimes, her mother. No, wait, that’s wrong. Sometimes I call her my daughter and sometimes my stepdaughter. I never say I’m her “mother,” even though I relinquished the prime years of my life to raise her, doing all the things a mother does. My partner was twenty-one when she came into the world; we have never married. Some stories are harder to tell than others.
-Morgan English