darkness and bluster: thoughts on Poe

 

I spent parts of the weekend digesting the whole of Netflix's Fall of the House of Usher, something I have been waiting for for over a year, being a huge Mike Flanagan fan and lover of Poe in general. It was everything I expected and more--a modern day gothic chilling tale of corporate greed and evil, of extreme moral ambiguousness, set within the frames of Poe stories and poems. And so many poems, enough to make this writer and one-time English major, quiver with delight. I found myself thinking about Poe and how well it all holds together, even nearly 170 years later. How influential his work still is on the literary consciousness of writers, despite his entire life and career riddled with depression and addiction. How Flanagan takes the work and bends it into something new, yet immensely true to the original. 

I first encountered Poe in junior high--in things like "The Raven" and "The Telltale Heart" (both of which get great treatment in the series) but it was "Annabelle Lee" that caught my attention as a fledgling diary-scribbling poet of 16. So much so that I briefly joined something called  the "Poetry Club"  led by my junior year English teacher who taught it the next year, though my involvement was limited due to play rehearsals and newspaper obligations.  I remember a couple of meetings with desks arranged in a circle while other students read their work. At the time, I was writing but would have been too terrified to share. Later, in college, I would spend a spooky cider-sipping Halloween evening reading Poe's "Cask of Amontillado"  at an English Dept event in the lounge what was later rumored to be a haunted dorm. Throughout my two literary-focused degrees, Poe was a constant companion, including in a grad class devoted entirely to the American Renaissance of the 1850s. Even in the past couple of years, there have been Poe-related lesson assignments--about American Romanticism and some of the short stories. 

I often think about the Greeks and how pervasively their stories remain in Western thought, but Poe is up there on the list as well. For all of Poe's wraith-like rants against other writers and his worry that he was an utmost failure (all too often related), he manages to stick. Beautifully horrific things still bear his fingerprints. While if you asked me who I liked more, I would say Nathaniel Hawthorne (who examined similar ideas with a little more subtleness), I still love Poe for all his darkness and bluster, which make the series an especially delightful experience that also got me thinking about my recent waffling in regard to writing poems. How I often feel like no one is listening and maybe no one is. But then Poe thought this as well. So maybe I just need to leave my worries to time and allow the chips to fall where they may.