Poetry Museum

Silent Movie Art

Stephen King captures the essence of a scene in 13-16 words. He restates the simple phrase, The Picnic Basket, twice in the sixteen word paragraph.   The poetic form is 5 syllable, followed by 12 syllable, then concludes with 5 syllable. Then if you subtract the repeated words picnic basic and include that in place of the you find a Haiku, 5-7-5.  The haiku form creates a great tension between order and chaos, and makes us (the reader) take heed.   The words remind me of William Carlos Williams the Red Wheelbarrow.  

The picnic basket.
That damned red picnic basket full of her drawings.
How that haunts me.  

- Duma Key page 347.

The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams

---

so much depends
upon a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

Musical Notes

Girl and Ship of Duma Key #1

© Mark Moore

 Music mentioned in in Stephen King's Duma Key:
Fancy
by Reba McEntire 



Renegade
by Styx

Hair of the Dog
by Nazareth


Listen to the Radio Station mentioned in Duma Key: The Bone.

As mentioned....

Stephen King mentions Richard Eberhart, “The Groundhog,” written in 1936,  in his book and great resource Danse Macabre.   Children look at death as a poet looks at it with experimentation.  

"Horror movies are not sophisticated, and because they are not, they allow us to regain our childish perspective on death - perhaps not such a bad thing...Children see more intensely.   The greens of lawns are, to the child's eye the color of lost emeralds... the blue of the winter sky is as sharp as an icepick, the white of new snow is a dream blast of energy.  And black is much blacker.  Much blacker indeed." (king 194)

Classic Horror Films

Currently Reading

I am currently reading Danse Macabre by Stephen King.  The book is a treasure map in locating the origins and influences on the Horror Genre. Stephen King has rarely stepped into the realm of non-fiction essay writing, except for his occasional article for Entertainment Magazine. However rare his nonfiction is, it is treasured. 

The book could use a technological update.  What about an interactive book, where links bring you to the available media mentioned in the book.     I have found a number of cool things mentioned in the book on the internet archive (including Mars Is Heaven?)

Haiku Review of the Wasteland by Stephen King

Haiku Summary of the Wasteland by Stephen King:

Choo Choo Engine,
stood before Roland the Brave
asking mean riddles.

Believe me there is more to this book than that, because there is nothing quit like Stephen King. He grabs a hold of you and will never let go. He uses the mythic structure of the Heroes Quest, while keeping the form current by not letting the work go into the drawers of cliche.
The dark tower is the subterranean river that flows beneath all of his books. When we jump into the adventure of the Ka-tet, we are seeing the strands of King's other works being tied up and completed. He has created a universe that will keep you awake at night.

Notes on Authors

Stephen King is our Charles Dickens:

"I'd say what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back from the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time and that particular book was written. In every life you get a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What this shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we life in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires, and ghouls and ghosts." Stephen King in an Interview to the Paris Review

Novel Reivews:

Review-Stephen King's 11.22.63

 

 11/22/63 by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As Stephen King said repeatedly in 11.22.63, “The past harmonizes”....and so does this book.  11.22.63 shows King traveling in the time streams between 2011 and 1958 United States.  I agree with Time Magazine when they said that this book is a great travelogue back to the 1950’s American Landscape.   However, this book is much more than just a mere nostalgic kick down Route 66.
 
The main character, Jack Epping, thinks he must go back in time and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.  He, like many, feels that if just John F. Kennedy was not shot then the world would be a much better place.  But we find that changing the strings of time is never for the better no matter the intentions.  And you can’t stop God’s hand in our storied time; there is no legislation to do away with earthquakes, or tornadoes.

This book was tremendously researched, and because of this one comes away with a sense that this really could be true.   King used his historical research and connected the strands into one epic masterfully.  He is a master at pinpointing the zeitgeist for our age; he understands the times and the people better than the talking heads over at C.N.N. and Fox News. I might even say that Stephen King is our current United State's Charles Dickens.

Be careful for time traveling with King has the possibility of creating jet leg without stepping across a time zone.  The end of the book is a stunner.

Readers who liked this book can also check out Jack Finney’s Time and Again and From Time to Time.
View all my reviews

Literature as Philosophy: 11.22.63

Oswald: Psychopaths Next Door

Time According to Stephen King: Impressions from 11.22.63

Note:this review on the premise that time travel is possible, in order to avoid getting stuck in a review of time travel 

 

Time harmonizes with itself.    One can imagine a classical guitar player playing a melody, so pure that the million strings on the million string guitar gets tighter and tighter, then the crystal breaks and shatters as the customers scream.  Time knows how many strings are to be played at any one time.  King shows that if one goes back in time the harmony may get too pure that it will reverberate across the time strings.  The tune will have costly results.
Time is not something to play with. We all have a need to reset some part of our past.  The day we walked into the local newsstand and bought our first porno magazine.   The day we missed an important deadline.  The day we blew off our dad or mom when they needed us most. But time turns on a dime. The tune has already been perfectly harmonized.   So what does that mean to the troubles of a time?  Well that is part of the harmonization.    However, this is not a bitter note.  This is a note that life is life.  And one’s hopes are important, because when people lose hope there is bound to be explosions.

Library Notes

I am currently reading the Stand and now that this will take me a long time.   The book has a great following and one group of Stand fans twittered a version of the book.  It's rather cool, check it out now.  The site also plays a soundtrack that is connected to the book.