…at Poe’s grave in Baltimore. Left to right: Pam Plymell, Rod McKuen, Paul Grillo, Charles Plymell, Liz Plymell seated. (Image: courtesy Pam Plymell/Cherry Valley Editions.)

By ARAM SAROYAN [The Nervous Breakdown] — In the winter of 1976, I committed the professional and personal faux pas of giving a poetry reading with Rod McKuen. It took place at the Veterans Auditorium in downtown San Francisco and was supposed to be a benefit for the San Francisco State University poetry program. Lewis MacAdams, my friend and fellow resident of Bolinas, the radical seacoast town at the western edge of Marin County, was just then employed as director of the program. I had wanted a reading in that year’s series, of course, but Lewis and I were poetry competitors as well as friends. (I should say that poets, generally perceived as ivory tower dreamers and underpaid to the point of extinction, are among the most vainglorious and unforgiving in the matter of readings, appointments, anthologies, and the like, none of it amounting to a hill of beans.) In the months prior to the McKuen/Saroyan slate being set, my suspicion was that Lewis wasn’t going to include me on his schedule of readers, and this despite all the stuff I’d published recently, including full-page poems in Rolling Stone, New Age, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Is it any wonder I was copiously engaged at that moment trying to switch into more welcoming genres, from book reviews and magazine articles to a novel and a biography? Rolling Stone had printed the first of my full page poems several years before, and I had built on a relationship with the magazine, specifically with its editor-in-chief, Jann Wenner, to aid me in discovering a path into the open air of modern America, so to speak, and out of the tiny, vituperative sandbox of American poetry. In that ill-appointed domain you had the fortunate few sitting on little perches—castles in the sand indeed—and, otherwise, endless lunatics with pails and shovels, erupting water and sand fights, booze, blood, piss and mucous, carrying on 24/7, bitching, yelling, punching each other, crying, marrying their students, bragging, getting knocked unconscious by their younger wives, and soiling themselves. Did I leave anything out? This is simply the American literary life, sub-genus Poets. Gregory Corso, an outlander, said it beautifully I think: Poetry is great; it’s the poets who fuck it up.

One of the ideas I got for Rolling Stone was that I should interview Rod McKuen….Rod and I did the interview. Annie Liebovitz came to his Beverly Hills house with me to take photographs, and we spent the night there, I in “the room with the ghost,” Rod told me. I woke up in the middle of the night, and sure enough, there it was—ectoplasmic but clearly impalpable and harmless, at the foot of the bed. Annie photographed Rod, and me too…

Continued at The Nervous Breakdown | h/t Cherry Valley Editions | More Chronicle & Notices.