If I had to take a guess for why that should be, then I'd have to chalk it up to an evolution in human artistic taste, pure and simple. The poem proper seems to belong to a time when the prose story as we now have it wasn't even a glimmer of possibility in the mind of any of the major writers prior to the 18th century. If you go back and look at the historical record of mankind's written works, you'll soon find that there was a time when the major form of literary expression wasn't the prose line, but rather that of verse. Even every single line of dialogue that Shakespeare ever wrote has more in common with poetry than it does the kind of stylistic practices we expect from modern stage plays. This is all because it really does appear to have taken us that long to perfect the idea of the prose mode of expression. This in itself points to a whole history of how human beings conception of the art of storytelling tells its own tale of mental evolution. One of those fundamental concepts that are so obvious its no wonder it takes so long for any of us to notice it. It's a topic well worth digging into some other time, perhaps.
Right now, the main point is that this evolution in our understanding of how stories can be told means that with the advent of prose, the artistic expression of prosody soon found itself relegated to a kind authorial second-class citizen status. As time went on, and some of the best names in the business came along and helped to develop the idea of the good prose line, the art of versification began to take a backseat to all the windows onto new vistas that were opening up for artists and audiences around the world. This constant strand of development and craftsmanship applied to the non-lyrical mode of storytelling has lead us, with the passage of time to the current situation we now find ourselves. The practice of novelistic literary writing seems to have reached its apex. We're now perhaps as close to artistic perfection as the prose line is ever going to be able to achieve. What few of us seem to have realized until just now is how this accomplishment in stylistic excellence has come at the cost of poetry itself. It's as if there's been an unconscious law of exchange involved here. Something that was always going on, yet we were too preoccupied to see it. The better we were at using prose, the less of a need we had for the use of poetry. It's gotten to the point where the very verse form that was once considered the height of literary sophistication is now regarded as something like an extra accessory implement.
In an essay with the suggestive title of The Dead Zone (not the novel of the same name) Vincent makes a number interesting observations on the relation that King has to the writing of poetry. "In a 2011 interview with the Atlantic, Stephen King shared his thoughts about poetry. “[Poetry] takes ordinary life,” he said, “it takes things that we all see, and concentrates them in this beautiful gem. When the good ones do that, that’s what you get.” He singled out Philip Larkin and James Dickey as poets who express life’s sometimes inexpressible beauty and mysteriousness and concluded, “poets … do speak God’s language—it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives (web)". From there, Vincent goes on to make a very obvious admission on the subject.
"King might seem an unlikely arbiter of poetic language. His best-selling novels, short stories, and film adaptations—mostly but not exclusively in the horror genre—have earned him sobriquets ranging from “America’s Storyteller” to the “populist poet of American doom.” But King is also a committed poet, albeit not a prolific one. He’s published barely more than a dozen poems over the past five decades, most in small literary journals, although hundreds more exist on scraps of paper or in half-used notebooks, and several others appear in his novels as the work of his characters (ibid)". The idea of King as someone with a commitment to poetry is an interesting idea. The open question for me has to do with just how valid it is? There's one poem of King's in particular that I recall reading not too far back, and for whatever reason (whether good or bad) it has always remained stuck in my head.
The title was Harrison State Park 68, if I recall. It took a while to track down a useable copy of the poem online. However, I now have the whole thing in my possession. Having a chance to go over it once more has been an interesting sort of experience, and I'd like to share the results of it with you now. In going over the 68 poem, I'm going to have to make considerable use of Vincent's essay. In many ways, what follows is going to be something of a dialogue with the critic's views about the relation of King to poetry, as well as whatever merits the author deserves as a poet. With this in mind, I think it's best if we let the original poem itself do the talking as a good way to start things off.
The Poem.
"All mental disorders are simply detective
strategies for handling difficult life situations” – Thomas Szasz.
“And I feel like homemade shit” – Ed Sanders.
“- Can you do
it?
She asked
shrewdly
From the grass
where her nylon legs
in gartered
splendor
made motions.
- Can you do it?
“Ah!
What do I say?
What are the
cools?
Jimmy Dean?
Robert Mitchum?
Soupy Sales?
Modern Screen
Romances is a tent on the grass
Over a dozen
condoms
in a quiet box
and the lady
used to say
(before she
passed away)
- If you can't
be an athlete,
be an athletic supporter.
A cloud scum
has covered the
stars.
A man with a
gun has passed
this way
BUT -
we do not need
your poets.
Progressed
beyond them to
Sony
Westinghouse
Cousin Brucie
the Doors
and do I dare
mention Sonny
and Cher?
“I remember
Mickey Rooney
as Pretty Boy
Floyd
and he was the
shortest Pretty Boy Floyd
on record
coughing his
enthusiastic
guts out in the
last
reel.
“We have not spilt the blood.
They have spilt
the blood.
A little girl
lies dead
On the
hopscotch grid
No matter
She asked
shrewdly
With her
Playtex living bra
cuddling
breasts
softer than a
handful of wet Fig Newtons.
Old enough to
bleed
Old enough to
slaughter
The old farmer
said
And grinned at
the white
Haystack sky
With sweaty
teeth
(radiation
radiation
your
grandchildren will be
monsters)
“I remember a
skeleton
In Death Valley
A cow in the sun-bleached throes of antiseptic
death
and someone said:
- Someday there will be skeletons
on the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway
staring up at exhaust-sooty pigeons
amidst the flapping ruins of
Botany 500
call me Ishmael.
I am a semen.
“- Can you do it?
She asked shrewdly
When the worms begin
their midnight creep
and the dew has sunk white to
milk the grass...
And the bitter tears
Have no ducts
The eyes have fleshed in.
Only the nose knows that
A loser is always the same.
It slices the night cleanly
And thumps home with a tin can spannnng!
Against the Speed Limit sign down the road.
“Laughter
The clean clear sound of a bolt levered
back...
Silence...
Spannng!
"Aileen,
if poachers poached peaches, would the
poachers peel the peaches to eat with poached
eggs
poached before peaches?"
“oh don’t
don’t
please touch me
but don’t
don’t
and I reach for your hand
but touch only the radiating live pencils
of your bones:
-- Can you do it”?
A Breakdown of the Poem's Content.
"King later recalled the workshop as like “being on a long drunk,” an exciting period that produced nothing notable from him. “But, on the other hand, I wasn’t typical,” he writes. “For a lot of people, good did come of it.” He identifies the semester as one of his rare “dry periods” from writing fiction, which he attributes to spending too much time analyzing the work he produced. He worried about how his classmates would dissect his writing—a process foreign to King’s approach. “I’m the kind of writer that doesn’t know jack shit about anything,” he says in a 2016 interview. “I’m totally intuitive about this. I don’t plot ahead, I don’t outline.”
As far as Vincent is concerned, "As a hodgepodge of images and lame jokes (“if you can’t be an athlete, / be an athletic supporter”), the poem is cryptic, although the imagery anticipates death and perhaps a nuclear holocaust (“Someday there will be skeletons / on the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway”). At the end, the narrator reaches for his lover’s hand but touches “only the radiating live pencils / of your bones.” As Collings writes, “The more formal distancing and verbal texture of poetry often comes between King as poet and his audience,” and “Harrison State Park ’68” is a prime example. Unlike King’s more mature works, which are colloquial, linear, and cinematic, the poem is more a literary object than a story (ibid)". Vincent's idea of the poem as a mere hodgepodge of imagery is interesting inasmuch as my own reaction to the poem has left me with the sense that perhaps there's more going on here than the reader might be able to tell at just a first glance. For starters, the more I go over this work, the clearer its general outlines start to become, and I begin to catch glimpses of what I'm going to call a narrative embryo of sorts; a kind of incomplete narrative which still manages to have the faint glimmers of a legitimate beginning, middle, and closing resolution. Here's the story as I can figure it out.
On the simplest level, what the poem presents us with in its opening and main action is that of a tryst between a pair of would-be lovers. The poem's main cast consists of the nameless narrator and the girl he has taken to a secluded spot for what is implied to be his first time making out. The woman appears to be a hell of a lot more experienced than he is in these matters. Hence the poem's opening question, "Can you do it"? In other words, do you know anything about making love to a girl? Do you know what a woman wants? Do you have any idea of how to give her the satisfaction she's looking for? Can you do any of these things, and do them well? Do you love? It's here that the opening line of the poem matches well with one of the epigraphs. In particular, the response to the woman's question seems anticipated in the line King quotes from the countercultural poet Ed Sanders, "I feel like homemade shit". In other words, this guy doesn't sound like he'll be capable of giving his date what she wants, even if he wanted to.
The narration then begins to wax somewhat philosophical as the main character begins to mull over how the art of courtship has changed with the passage of years. In an earlier age, he might have resorted to poetry to try and win the lady's hand. However, he decides that such a time has come and gone. There's no more need for poets in an age that has given us Cousin Brucie, Sonny and Cher, or Jim Morrison and the Doors. So far, so pathetic, and its doesn't look as if the narrator's luck is going to change on that score. Right before this bit of musing, however, the poem begins to sound its first off-note. There's a flicker of movement that the narrator catches out of the corner of his eye. It's when attention is broken off from the main action that the story begins to enter some very familiar sounding territory to long time readers of Stephen King. "A man with a gun has passed this way". There's something ominous in the way the intrusion of this glaring image is presented in what was heretofore a normal enough setting. It also doesn't hurt that even in a work of poetry, King is able to give that line of verse an appropriate sense of build-up in just the single space of the two couplets that come before it.
Now the poet has us appropriately on edge. The sudden intrusion of violent imagery associated with death and murder is compounded and coupled with the narrator's curt dismissal that it doesn't matter. However in the next verse, the lead speaker's thoughts continue on in this vein, recalling the words spoken to him by an old farmer imparting some arcane yet dangerous sounding information about how someone (presumably children in general) can become old enough to slaughter when they're old enough to bleed. The thought process of the poem has taken on an certifiably unhinged level of conception. We're now peering through a window in a mind with a tenuous connection to sanity. What started out sounding normal enough now reveals itself to be an outlook shaped by unhealthy interests and toxic relationships. Indeed, the mention of the deranged words of the old farmer puts one in mind of the kind of toxic relationship that the author would later go on to write about in novella's such as Apt Pupil. Where a teenage boy come under the corrupting influence of a former World War II criminal. It could very well be that these lines detailing a dangerous relation between a crazy old farmer and the speaker of the poem amounts to nothing less than this same idea in a kind of artistic embryo state. The first stirring of a concept that the writer will go on to explore at greater length during his career.
The words of the second main character in the poem bring the narrator back to the present moment, with the repetition of her original question, the one that opened the poem. "Can you do it"? What happens next is more or less implied to be the speaker's attempts to "do it" with the girl, and yet it all goes wrong, perhaps in a very deadly way. The closing verses seem to indicate the following. When main character turns his attention back to his date, it seems like things are back to normal. Then he begins to fantasize her as either a dead or living corpse. This is followed by the loud report from a gun, as the rifleman can now be heard taking potshots at road sings somewhere not too far in the distance. The finial lines seem to be spoken for the most part by the girl, and it's worth pointing out how the tone of her words seem to switch automatically from one of cool confidence, and mature seduction to that of alarm and begging as the narrator reaches out for her. It's impossible to shake the idea that as the poem draws to a close, the woman realizes that she is not the narrator's date, but rather his latest victim.
Conclusion: An Early Peak into the Writer's Storehouse.
I'll have to confess I came away more impressed by his performance here than when I first went in. I've got this clear memory of coming away unimpressed with with my initial read-through of the work. It's one of those cases where somehow nothing clicks until you give it a second go. I think what helped me get a better handle on the material the second time around is the understanding that I was reading a series of rough drafts for a lot of ideas that King would go on to explore at greater length in his prose work. It helps if you can break down the elements of the poem into parts, and then try and recall where else you've seen each idea before. The most obvious example here is that picture of a radiated, post-apocalyptic landscape that King would later go on to make his own. The Stand is one of those novels that seems to have achieved its own zeitgeist status by this point. Even those who've never read it seem to have this odd ability to be familiar with its contents even if they qualify as non-readers. It's one of the author's most familiar calling cards along with the likes of The Shining. The elements of the poem that jump out at me the most, however, are the main setup of a young narrator who begins to show signs of being ever so slightly insane during the course trying to make-out with his date.
Perhaps it therefore makes better sense to view "Harrison State Park 68" as something of an unofficial prequel to "Strawberry Spring". We're given an early glimpse of the narrator of that later story in a more poetic, impressionistic mode, when the troubled mind is at the height of its psychosis, thus accounting for the work's broken and fragmented nature. Whereas the later account is told in a more lucid seeming state of mind. Beyond all these speculation lies the ever-important question of just what was up with the poem as King wrote it? What does it mean, in other words? In term's of the work's intrinsic meaning and how this determines the poem's value, then for me I'd have to say it all comes from the artist discovering a number of what would soon become his primary themes, the creative notions that King would return to time and again in his career. The reason why he would keep returning to these particular wells is pretty obvious once you realize that they are all the tap springs that continue to fire his Imagination even to this day. As far as the author's publication history is concerned, what makes a poem like "Harrison State Park" so important is that it marks that important moment when the author begins to realize where his inspiration comes from, and is able to capture most of that material down on the printed page for the first time. Not just that, he's also able to get his efforts published.
In this initial exploration of his inner landscape, the theme that all of the writer's other ideas wind up coalescing around seems to a very familiar trope of the Horror genre. What King has given us here in one of his first professional pieces is nothing less than a riff on the classic urban legend of the Hook. It just makes sense for me to view this as the underlying structure of the poem, because all of its setup and execution plays out as nothing less than a surprisingly competent variation on the tale. The main difference is that King has taken the key notion of the legend, and flipped it somewhat on it's head. A better way to phrase it, however, is to say that the author has turned it inside out. The typical setup of the story of the Hook involves a Lover's Lane couple who hear on their car radio that a maniac with a hook for a hand has escaped from the local asylum. When the girl starts to here strange noises first nearby in the woods, and then seemingly right outside their car, she begs her boyfriend to take her home. He obliges, yet when he gets the girl to her house, and goes to let her out of the car, he's shocked to find a disembodied hook hanging from the car door. King's poem features no such crude "device". Instead, all that's happened is that the Boy and the Hook characters have both been melded into one.
The way King does this is that he talks about the meaning of the Hook by discussing all of the themes and ideas that go together to make it a complete piece of national folklore. This includes questions of the dramatic effects the good Horror story is supposed to achieve, what we talk about when we discuss the idea of monsters and monstrosity, and how all of this tied into the Youth Culture of King's era, which was coincidentally, the seed bed where the legend of the Hook first took root and then went on to become what in retrospect is best described as an icon of Horror fiction. Yet the sad part is ol' Mr. Hook never seems to have gotten the same level of respect such as those given to either Freddy or Jason. This is all the more ironic to me when you consider that not only is the urban legend a lot more effective then either Friday the 13 or A Nightmare on Elm Street, but also the fact that each of them is no more than the Hook character dressed up in different masques. In my opinion, the only slasher films that measure up to the quality of the legend boils down to just two classics, Psycho and Halloween, yet that's a debate for another day. The real point is how even in a non-fiction setting King is able to take the materials and tropes of the modern Gothic tale and then proceed to turn them on their heads.
The troubling part is that it serves as little more than fuel for the narrator's own deranged personal fire. He's willing to use the threat of human extinction as an excuse to carry out his murderous desires. This addition of an apocalyptic element somehow manages to give the poem an interesting mythic resonance. It's a familiar keynote to be found in the rest of King's fiction. This is something that can be found even outside of The Stand and The Dark Tower, in works such as It, Salem's Lot, or Firestarter. The idea of taking the Hook of urban legend and finding some way of being able to give this character a mythic, epic resonance is just one of those abilities that I think only King or a handful of others have ever been able to pull off with anything approaching such levels of genuine artistic finesse.
The almost perfect punchline to all of this is the impression it leaves me with of the finished product. I'm not going to lie, I came in here expecting I would have to tear this work apart. That this whole thing was just going to be me pointing out all of the poem's flaws, and having to give responses to each of Vincent's praises. Instead, to my own surprise, here I find myself willing to give both men a bit more credit than I anticipated. The best excuse I've got for why that should be is because of something King mentioned about the way writing works in any possible book. He said something to the effect that a good work of fiction is something that pays back in dividends. The trick is the reader always had to be willing to put in the extra effort required to get the full entertainment value out of it. The idea that the audience is just as much an active participant in the creation of a story does sound strange in an age where the automatic assumption is that reading and watching are all just so much spectator sports. The funny thing is I guess my own experience proves just how true King's words are, because the second time I came back this poem, it was like reading another piece of work entirely. This time the language made sense, and better still, so did the images it painted, and the message they conveyed.
I'd argue that even if you want to go ahead and claim that "Strawberry Spring" is the better work, it's still no valid critical reasoning to slight this bit of verse as the lesser of two works. It may be the poetical egg out of which the short story hatched, yet it's crucial that the hatchling is nothing without the embryo. And the good thing about this forgotten work is that it can stand as its own thing, regardless of what came after. What King has accomplished here is the refashioning of a classic urban legend in metrical form. The only thing more surprising than stumbling across a riff version of The Hook is to notice the skill that the writer utilizes in telling us this familiar tale. One of the epigraphs chosen for the poem notes how mental disorders are strategies for handlings life situations. It's perhaps the most telling line of the whole piece, as the narrative of the verse deals with a troubled young man who resorts to violence against women in order to avoid dealing with the dark issues that he's grappling with. The use of the Szasz quotation then serves a double purpose. As well as hinting at the true nature of the story, it is the poem's way of signaling that there is meant to be an element of tragedy about the whole affair. We're not meant to feel sympathy for the Hook, but rather the kind of Classical pity one used to reserve for the likes of Shakespeare's version of Richard III. It's a crucial yet overlooked truth inside the lie.
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