ABOUT POEtry and PrOsE

 

	celebrating the 200th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe by a congeries of writers from all over and from right here

Endnote

Why this little book? Why not? 2009 would have been

Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birth year had he survived and

the artists and writers of St. Mary's University's faculty and

staff (and assorted other suspects from the greater San An-

tonio, United States and World community) wanted to do

something to honor this superb craftsperson of poetry and

prose, as an early professional writer, managed to support

himself (not very well) by doing American literature as his job.

We (as a self-selected community) had done this before

with that great progenitor of American free verse poetry,

Walt Whitman. And to honor the 500th birthday of the

great Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and

the 100th of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

But Poe? Well, this year was the bicentennial of his

birth. Everyone in this much-too-small little book takes a

fairly light-hearted approach to the whole thing, from the

introduction to this endnote, but still, they write to honor

the writer. They are, in turn, satirical, lyrical, panegyrical...

anything but empirical. Poor misunderstood Eddie Poe...

the man who was NOT really an alcoholic but is

remembered as such; the writer who died too young but

still accomplished so much.

It is not, after all, true of Edgar Poe that there is much

less there than meets the eye. He was, among other

things, one of the first great critics of American literature.

He was an accomplished poet, almost single-handedly

created the detective story, and wrote some of the great-

est horror stories of all time. Without him, no one would

ever have heard of Vincent Price.

Aside from the book (and a reading from it and from the

works of the perhaps not-so-divine Edgar), the Louis J.

Blume Library will also be hosting a city-wide art exhibition

of works based upon stories and poems by Poe.

H. Palmer Hall

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