Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (44 page)

Clearly this novel, and most likely the 1953 film, had a strong impact on King – strong enough to deliver a poem at the end of his college career, and a loving analysis of the book and films in his non-fiction work about horror. For this reason, this fairly inaccessible poem must be considered of import to the King canon. 

Silence
(1970) 

The original appearance of this 12-line King poem was in also
Moth
magazine in 1970. Its next publication was not until
The Devil’s Wine
, again the easiest access point for readers. It is an America Under Siege work. In it the narrator hears nothing except the fridge and stands waiting, with “book in hand,” for the furnace to kick on.  

Typically of King, horror is close at hand with the two single word lines, “murder/ lurks” and the line, “the feary silence of fury.” Tyson Blue
⁹¹
says the poem “…is not as accessible as some of the other King poems, and has more in common with haiku, which tries to evoke within its rigidly-structured form the feeling of an event rather than a narrative of something which happened.” 

Woman with Child
(1971) 

Woman with Child
was first published in a magazine,
Contraband
, #1
for 31 October 1971 (Halloween). The 17-line poem has never been republished. The best chance for readers to access it is to acquire a photocopy at the Raymond H. Fogler Library of the University of Maine at Orono, from the original magazine. Interestingly, King did not allow this poem to be reprinted along with six other poems from the 1960s and 1970s he
did
allow to be included in
The Devil’s Wine
. 

This poem, the most mainstream of his works in this form, is impossible to define as part of a particular “Reality.”  

In it a pregnant woman gets out of the bath and feels her unborn child moving. The imagery in this poem is vivid, “…her groping/ fingers find the yellow bathsoap beneath one/ elephantine thigh …” and concludes, “In the dark depths of her the creature turns silently,/ as if toward the surface,/ or the sun.” 

This is a poem without horror or undertones, simply a mainstream reflection of a moment in time in a pregnant woman’s daily life. There were actually two King poems in this publication, as discussed in the following section. 

Untitled (She Has Gone to Sleep While …)
(1971) 

King had a second poem in
Contraband
, #1
for 31 October 1971. Untitled, it begins with the line, “She has gone to sleep while …” 

The 28-line poem has never been republished. Again, the best chance for readers to access it is to acquire a photocopy at the Raymond H. Fogler Library of the University of Maine at Orono, from the original magazine. This is the second of the poems known to exist at the time that King did not allow to be reprinted with the six other poems from the 1960s and 1970s that he
did
allow to be re-published in
The Devil’s Wine
.
 

In the poem, which is part of the America Under Siege Reality, the narrator drives his car while a female we assume is his wife, sleeps. He thinks about what his life will become, as he grows older. In one interesting point the narrator thinks of his inner thoughts as “the Library of Me.”
This could just as easily describe Gary Jones’ mind in
Dreamcatcher
.
 

This is another poem without horror or undertones, simply a mainstream reflection.  

The Hardcase Speaks
(1971) 

The Hardcase Speaks
was first published in a magazine,
Contraband
, #2
for 1 December 1971, with the credit erroneously given as ‘Stephan King’. The magazine also carried a poem about vampires by King’s wife, Tabitha and another by mentor Burton Hatlen. Only 66 lines long, it is written in the slightly delirious style of the late 1960s hippie generation, of which King was, of course, a part (see
Tommy
later in this chapter). It is an America Under Siege work. 

Its next publication was not until
The Devil’s Wine
, nearly three and a half decades later in 2004 and this is now its easiest access point for readers. The original
Contraband
may also be photocopied at the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono.  

There are a number of interesting signposts in this poem. For instance, King uses a terminology that also appeared in
The Dark Man
. Here we read, “punctuated by the sodium lightness glare of freights/ rising past hobo cinder gantries and pitless bramble hollows:” In the earlier poem he wrote, “i have ridden rails/ and burned sterno in the/ gantry silence of hobo jungles;”  

Early in the poem “Harlow” is mentioned. Harlow is a key location in a number of King stories:
It Grows on You
(the
Marshroots
/
Weird Tales
and
Whispers
versions),
Movie Show
and
Riding the Bullet
. It has a considerable role in both
Blaze
and
The Body
and is mentioned in
Bag of Bones
,
The Dark Half
,
Gerald’s Game
,
Nona
(the
Skeleton Crew
version),
Rage
,
Under the Dome
and
Uncle Otto’s Truck
(the
Skeleton Crew
version).
 

King refers to a serial murderer (a favorite in his prose):  

in 1954 in a back alley behind a bar they/ found a lady cut in four pieces and written in her juice on the bricks above/ he had scrawled PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN in letters that leaned and/ draggled so they called him The Cleveland Torso Murderer and never caught him, 

And this, “Real life is in the back row of a 2nd run movie house in Utica, have you been there.” King has famously declared to the inane repeat questioning of lazy reporters and interviewers wanting to know where he gets his ideas that he buys them in a small shop in Utica. King’s fascination for Charles Starkweather, who killed ten people in 1958, recurs with: “bore a little hole in your head sez I insert a candle/ light a light for Charlie Starkweather and let/ your little light shine shine shine.” This line also reminds readers of the pencil-probing exercise in
The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson
section of
The Tommyknockers
. Flagg also refers to his relationship with Starkweather in
The Stand
. 

One spectacular two line verse reads with King’s visceral power, ”in huge and ancient Buicks sperm grows on seatcovers/ and flows upstream toward the sound of Chuck Berry.” 

After a series of strange observations (“The liberals have shit themselves and produced a satchel-load of smelly numbers”) and instructions (‘eat sno-cones and read Lois Lane’) the poem ends with this: “Go now. I think you are ready.” Manic, yet slightly disappointing, this poem is however clearly King – using trademarks, famous people and gruesome themes. 

In the Key-Chords of Dawn
(1971) 

This 18-line poem was published without a title in a literary magazine,
Onan
, in 1971 and would be King’s last published poem for fourteen years. Here it is referred to in the manner it is often described in the King community,
In the Key-Chords of Dawn
, for the convenience of readers. Piccirilli also lists it under the title
In the Key-Chords of Dawn
… This work, which was almost impossible to access before the publication of
The Devil’s Wine
in 2004, cannot be classified in a particular Reality. 

In it two people fishing realize that the pastime involves more than just eating the fish and it, like life, contains other responsibilities and complexities. 

The poem opens with, “In the key-chords of dawn/ all waters are depthless.” Philosophical in tone, we read in the second of the three verses that, “when we say ‘love is responsibility’;/ our poles are adrift in a sea of compliments.” And in the third: “…so we are/ forced to say ’fishing is responsibility’/ and put away our poles.”  

In his
The Annotated Guide to Stephen King
, Michael Collings interprets the fishing as a metaphor for love. 

Dino
(1994) 

Dino
was discovered by the King community in March 2004 as the result of an auction at the world’s greatest flea market, eBay. C.S. O’Brien of Bowery Books in New York City offered for sale a copy of an obscure literary magazine,
The Salt Hill Journal
. The magazine happened to contain a poem by a Stephen King and, more importantly, carried a signature apparently from
the
Stephen King. O’Brien was selling the magazine on behalf of one of the magazine’s original student editors (this person does not wish to be named). His teacher at the time was Stephen Dobyns (more of whom below). It is thought that King signed only five copies. O’Brien kindly provided the author with scanned copies of the poem, magazine cover and signature. 

After King expert Bev Vincent brought the auction to general attention its authenticity was quickly confirmed by King’s office. Wendy Bousfield, the now retired Reference Librarian at the E.S. Bird Library of Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York
⁹²
kindly provided your author with not only a copy of the poem but the following interesting information describing how such an obscure magazine came to carry a poem by one of the world’s best-selling authors; including a series of news articles relating to King’s appearance at the University. Wendy Bousfield
⁹³
and C.S. O’Brien are to be thanked for their assistance. 

On 26 April 1991, King gave a reading in Syracuse University’s Landmark Theatre to help raise funds for the Raymond Carver Reading Series (Carver also taught in Syracuse University’s creative program, from 1980 to 1983). King refused to take any reimbursement for travel funds. The theater was completely full and, at between $7.50 and $35 per ticket, the evening netted $35,000, putting the reading series in the black.  

According to the Syracuse
Herald-Journal
for December 12, 1995, “The king of horror fiction novels autographed several copies of the journal for a silent auction Wednesday at Barnes & Noble bookstore.” This places the auction on 13 December 1995. According to the article:  

“He (King) has donated a considerable amount of money to the Raymond Carver Reading series and also has an interest in the creative writing program at Syracuse.” Thomas said that he came to know King through a mutual friend, Stephen Dobyns, who wrote the book “Cemetery Nights” and also has a poem in the magazine. “He said he (King) was inspired to begin writing poems after reading Dobyns’ book,” Thomas said.  

Thomas or the reporter must have been misinformed for, as we know, King had been writing and publishing poems a quarter century earlier. Of interest is that in
Insomnia
Dorrance Marstellar gave Ralph Roberts a copy of one of Dobyns’ collections of poems,
Cemetery Nights
!