poem 003: walter benton imaginary lineage

After posting poem 002 I wrote a note about purposefully not teeing up each poem with an explanation, but I felt this one needed some context. It’s part of the narrative here at the beginning, and in the interest of getting to know one another a little better, here we are.

If you don’t recognize the name Walter Benton, in 1943 he published an insanely popular book of love poems entitled This Is My Beloved. I did not know it existed until shortly after my wife, Erica, and I got together and we acquired a handful of records that had belonged to her mother and father while they were still married. Among the LPs was Arthur Prysock’s This Is My Beloved, an album-length reading of verse from Benton’s book set to softcore Sixties orchestral jazz-funk composed by the legendary Mort Garson, he of Mother Earth's Plantasia fame. This is high-level dot-connecting record-collector geekery here – unavoidable in the narrative – and we still haven’t discussed Rod McKuen.

McKuen was a popular poet-singer who had a moment in the Sixties with his romantic poetry, and he credited Benton as his primary influence. Rod was a bonafide pop star, and an openly sexually fluid one at that. (A quote from his Carnegie Hall live album: “It doesn’t matter who you love, or how you love, but that you love.”) It’s mind-boggling to me that his particular schtick – albeit it quite genuine and resonant – put him in the limelight, and that his records and books were a go-to for certain (mostly hetero) couples looking to set the mood. Surveying the current pop landscape here in 2025, there is nothing even remotely close to a successor. McKuen was of a time and place, years before “Skinemax” and the ready availability of erotic home entertainment, and people legit played his records and/or read his poems as sonic aphrodisiacs.

In addition to the Prysock album, the records we inherited from Erica’s parents included a few McKuen LPs, and there was a book of his verse, too. I have since added more McKuen to our collection, about a dozen LPs in total. I appreciate them as cheese, but also free of irony, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge McKuen and the goofy-ass Prysock record as genuine influences, as self-effacing as poem 003 and my overall schtick may be at times. I often feel foolish to be preoccupied with such matters late in my forties, but love and lust are phenomenal subjects; think of how little art/entertainment we’d have without them, or what little we’d have to talk about. Life can’t all be weather reports and clown-car politicians.

P.S. Further connecting the dots, Benton, like me, was an alumni of Ohio University, graduating in 1934. HASHTAG BLEED GREEN, Walter. Or something.

And now, here’s poem 003:

arthur prysock
rod mckuen
(charles bukowski too)

look at you
you old buffoon
(who do you think you are?)