“Poe properly buried, 160 years later”

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found near death in a public house in Baltimore and several days later succumbed to “congestion of the brain.” There is no definitive record of his movements in the several days before he died, and there are many theories as to the cause of his death. Some say it was alcohol poisoning, some say it was some other illness or heart disease that killed him. Because it was election day in Baltimore and he was not wearing his own clothes when he died, others suspect that he was a victim of “cooping,” having been taken prisoner by a political gang, beaten and forced to vote repeatedly. He was attended by Dr. John Joseph Moran at Washington College Hospital, where he was kept a virtual prisoner and allowed no visitors, for several days slipping between consciousness and delirium. Moran reported that his final words were “Lord, help my poor soul!,” just before he expired on October 7.

Poe’s funeral was the next day, a hasty 3-minute ceremony in the damp chill, so sparsely attended that the minister declined to give a sermon. He was buried without a headstone, because the monument his cousin had ordered was accidentally destroyed by a derailed train. He was exhumed and reburied, with a new tomb monument, in 1875, at a ceremony to which several leading poets were invited, but only Walt Whitman attended.

Now, 160 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe has been given a proper send-off in Baltimore—a “viewing” of his recreated dead body in the casket, a funeral procession accompanied by bagpipes, and a memorial service with eulogies delivered by actors in the roles of his contemporaries and colleagues, attended by more than 700 admirers and mourners. The “master of the macabre” has at last been laid properly to rest.

from The Baltimore Sun:
“A Proper Reburial,” by Robert Little (with video of the viewing and funeral)
“Edgar A. Poe, local author and poet of much renown, was laid to rest at Westminster Hall yesterday inside a simple redwood coffin, after a grand theatrical and oratorical send-off to usher him, as he once wrote, ‘into the region of shadows.’ Of course the true Poe remained buried beneath the monument on the northwest corner of the church grounds in Southwest Baltimore, near where his body was placed hastily in a family plot soon after his death on October 7, 1849. But yesterday the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe’s death was revived, so that the great poet could receive the eulogy that eluded him in the days following his demise.”

[via]

TURN YOUR SPEAKERS ON!!

IT’S GARRISON KEILLOR READING e.e. cummings!! GO!

And not just ANY e.e. cummings, mind you…only the greatest one he ever wrote, in many fans’ opinions..

(photo credit)

Have you always wanted to write a haiku telling Rush Limbaugh he’s full of crap?

Well then, today’s your lucky day! This incredible opportunity is brought to you by the Facebook page Telling Rush Limbaugh He’s Full of Crap. Become a fan and leave your own artistic insult, haha. Some of my personal favorites [edited for punctuation, because that bothers me]:

All hail Boss Limbaugh,
deluded radio clown…
Shut yer fat gob, Rush! [William McKean]

Oh, you want haiku?
You arrogant pompous ass,
Hateful douchebaguette [Elizabeth Westberg]

Heard Rush this morning.
I will never be the same.
A few brain cells died. [Praneendra Kuver]

I live in Japan
so I never have to hear
anything so vile. [Gordon Luster]

Your head is too big.
Yes. Both figuratively
and literally. [Jenni Elam Parrish]

Limbaugh is so vile
even Hannibal Lecter
would not take a bite. [Matthew McAteer]

Christopher Phillips even branched out into limerick!

With his incessant bitching and squawking,
A huge bunch of sour grapes he is hawking.
But it’s quite plain to me
And for all to see
That’s the cognac and percocet talking!

“Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.” -Ambrose Bierce

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave me before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

["To My Mother" by Wendell Berry, from Entries.]

Ahhhhh.

An executive’s salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.

But the pay for a surgeon’s use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary’s cheque for handling paper.

And, a geologist’s hours with stone
nets more than a teacher’s with paper
and definitely beats someone’s time in a garment factory with scissors.

In addition: to manufacture paper
you need stone to extract metal to fabricate scissors
to cut the product to size.
To make scissors you must have paper to write out the specs
and a whetstone to sharpen the new edges.
Creating gravel, you require the scissor-blades of the crusher
and lots of order forms and invoices at the office.

Thus I believe there is a connection
between things
and not at all like the hierarchy of winners
of a child’s game.
When a man starts insisting
he should be paid more than me
because he’s more important to the task at hand,
I keep seeing how the whole process collapses
if almost any one of us is missing.
When a woman claims she deserves more money
because she went to school longer,
I remember the taxes I paid to support her education.
Should she benefit twice?
Then there’s the guy who demands extra
because he has so much seniority
and understands his work so well
he has ceased to care, does as little as possible,
or refuses to master the latest techniques
the new-hires are required to know.
Even if he’s helpful and somehow still curious
after his many years—

Without a machine to precisely measure
how much sweat we each provide
or a contraption hooked up to electrodes in the brain
to record the amount we think,
my getting less than him
and more than her
makes no sense to me.
Surely whatever we do at the job
for our eight hours—as long as it contributes—
has to be worth the same.

And if anyone mentions
this is a nice idea but isn’t possible,
consider what we have now:
everybody dissatisfied, continually grumbling and disputing.
No, I’m afraid it’s the wage system that doesn’t function
except it goes on
and will
until we set to work to stop it

with paper, with scissors, and with stone. 

["Paper, Scissors, Stone" by Tom Wayman from The Face of Jack Munro. © Harbour, 1986]

Poetry makes things easier.

So here’s Darwin’s Finches by Deborah Digges. :]

1
My mother always called it a nest,
the multi-colored mass harvested

from her six daughters’ brushes,
and handed it to one of us

after she had shaped it, as we sat in front
of the fire drying our hair.

She said some birds steal anything, a strand
of spider’s web, or horse’s mane,

the residue of sheep’s wool in the grasses
near a fold 

where every summer of her girlhood
hundreds nested.

Since then I’ve seen it for myself, their genius–
how they transform the useless.

I’ve seen plastics stripped and whittled
into a brilliant straw,

and newspapers–the dates, the years–
supporting the underweavings.

2
As tonight in our bed by the window
you brush my hair to help me sleep, and clean

the brush as my mother did, offering
the nest to the updraft.

I’d like to think it will be lifted as far
as the river, and catch in some white sycamore,

or drift, too light to sink, into the shaded inlets,
the bank-moss, where small fish, frogs, and insects

lay their eggs.
Would this constitute an afterlife?

The story goes that sailors, moored for weeks
off islands they called paradise,

stood in the early sunlight
cutting their hair. And the rare

birds there, nameless, almost extinct,
came down around them

and cleaned the decks
and disappeared into the trees above the sea.

Here’s a poem I dashed off last Wednesday:

Violets are purple,
Roses are red.
When I was a baby,
I fell on my head.