Rod McKuen was an early influence

Rod McKuen

Reference: Rod McKuen, Poet and Lyricist with Vast Following, Dies at 81.

Way back when, in the early to mid 1970s, when I was a shy, lonesome boy, novels and poetry were my saving grace.  I devoured books, sometimes reading inside the closet at night, so as not to wake up my younger brother.  I wrote a lot of lovestruck and lovelorn poems, which, on the occasion I would read them in recent years, were positively sappy.  But these were the beginnings of the kind of poet I would become and am still becoming. 

The early influences for me came by the names of Erica Jong and Anne Sexton, William Hunt and, yes, Rod McKuen.  I was drawn to themes in their poetry - sex and death, mystery and love, respectively - and I would emulate them in my writing.  The poems I ended up transcribing onto Word, however, were those from the late 1970s and afterwards.  The earlier ones I simply kept where I wrote them, mostly in a handful of spiral notebooks. 

I need look up those early poems, and post them here.