Stephen King is everywhere all of a sudden!  He most recently has a poem published in Playboy, which you can read at the Playboy website here.  [NSFW obviously, it being Playboy and all.]  Despite having a degree in English Lit with a focus on postmodern poetry, or perhaps because, I will confess to being a bit baffled by this poem.

I can forgive the style and voice of "The Bone Church," which is meant to evoke Lovecraft crossed with Heart of Darkness.  That being said, I could do with fewer piratical interjections like "Arr" by the narrator, though.  (He really does say "Arr," several times, without irony.)  And references to a nickelodeon which are every bit as baffling as anything else in the poem. 

The nickelodeon references place this poem at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century.  Although all I can think of when he says "nickelodeon" is the tourist trap stores that line Seattle's waterfront.  In my mind, King's "nickelodeon" reference serves only to place the poem squarely in the middle of Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, in between a display of fake rubber dog turds and Sylvester the cowboy mummy.

Even setting aside the campiness, which I believe to be deliberate, I got stuck on several problems both microscopic and macroscopic.  There seems to be no obvious reason why this is a poem, although you could say the same of many others.  However, the excess of line breaks seems to be designed to buttress the poem against certain missing elements of story structure.  Like an explanation for why 32 people were on the expedition in the first place, except to pad the length of the poem by dying one by one.  Seriously, doesn't 32 people seem like a lot for an expedition?  Given that most of them have no discernable purpose?  Who brings an anthropologist along on an expedition, anyway?  

And what exactly is meant by King's description of the (female) anthropologist as having an "ass like an English saddle"?  I think of the shape of an English saddle, but that can't be right.  Could he be talking about the texture, either of the leather (smooth and shiny) or the feel (hard; not pliant)?  But why specify an English saddle, since other kinds of saddles share those same traits?

Having studied the structure of the poem, I can find no obvious reason why it should be broken into stanzas where it is.  They seem to follow the paragraph convention of written fiction, but for no particular reason.  And there are a lot of clunkers among the words, including the unspeakable (literally - try speaking this aloud)

For the love of God bring whiskey,/
for life's a trudge without it!

It surprised me to see King, who usually has such an ear for dialogue, plop words like this on the page.  The use of "for" twice in the same sentence, the terrible sound of the words "life's a trudge," the idea that these words are being spoken by a rascally pirate… it just doesn't work.  Like, at all.

My final quibble may seem small, but it's a perfect example of what's wrong with King's contemporary writing.  He mentions "mammoths from the dead age when man was not."  Except that mammoths did indeed exist alongside humans; in fact, we are partially responsible for their extinction.  The most elementary fact checker or editor should have caught this, but whoever should be editing King's work has been asleep at the wheel recently.