The sun finally dropped behind the tree line on an October evening still warm from the day's golden light and I'm thinking of Rod McKuen poet and voice of a hundred fall nights who showed up when I needed him and stuck around, silly man, in a slender collection of anguish and love poems fragrant now with the dusty spores of a long-ago life I saw him last in a thrift store down on Riverside, nestled with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and Andy Williams in the crate of albums nobody wants anymore, this poet who sold more books in a single year than Alan Ginsberg sold in fifty, but it is Howl we remember and not A Cat Named Sloopy, alas, recalled from the randomness of a day in October and the light on my screen and the story that appeared, just like the poet, when I needed it most.
ps pirro 
I became a big Rod fan about the age of 12, when my mom introduced me to his work. Looking back to that time, I think the trouble was that he invented a new school of poetry, and the self-important posers in the critic class couldn’t grasp that.
Rod wrote pop poetry, rather than “serious” genres. As such, it’s accessible and speaks to emotion rather than intellect, which is why he sold so well and was such a star. (In an age when most poets could barely get published at all.)
If you compare him to the pop musicians of that era – Cat Stevens, Don McLean, Lobo, Bread, John Denver, Jim Croce, Gilbert O’Sullivan… the list is endless – you see the resemblance. No-one felt the need to belittle them for not being Mozart or Duke Ellington, whom they also exponentially out-sold; in that case, the critics could see the apples and oranges.
Unfortunately, Rod was unsuccessful at floating his new genre, and he’s gone down in litcrit as a “hack”. Which is too bad, because like the great pop musicians of his time he wrote some very good and worthwhile stuff. I’m grateful that my mom opened that door to emotional literacy when I was a kid.
Thanks for the review-in-verse; it took me right back.
I, too, was introduced to him by my mother, maybe I was 12 or 13, maybe a little older, around the time I was listening to every one of those songwriters you listed. Yes, the resemblance is clear. He was a sort of progenitor of that musical genre, even if, as you say, he was unsuccessful in floating his own poetic one. He succeeded in other ways. Thanks for making that connection.