Why Edgar Allan Poe?

 In "Chasing Ashes", I have Edgar Allan Poe as a character. My crazy idea was to make concrete certain ideas of America into concrete form. Poe was one of them, he has been in my life for a very long time. I memorized "Annabel Lee" in Third Grade, he was one of the authors in the Authors game, one of my few poetry collections was his, I saw the movies based on his stories, and I have read him off and on since I was a kid. For all the critical disdain, Poe runs through America. In my novel, I use my impressions of Poe; it is not meant to necessarily to be a biographically accurate portrayal of Poe. You can read what I have done, in part, on Thin Air's site, which published the excerpt "Passerby."

I think my views on Poe pretty much run with what Scott Peeples writes in How Edgar Allan Poe became the darling of the maligned and misunderstood 

 

When John Lennon sang “Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe” in “I Am the Walrus,” he didn’t have to say who was kicking him or why. The point was, Poe deserved better; the most interesting plants do grow in the shade, unlovely and unloved.

And that’s exactly why so many people – aspiring writers and artists, but also everyone when they’re lonely and misunderstood – see a little bit of themselves in the weary-but-wise image of Poe.

But I would quibble with the stories being only dark, anti-social tales, for I find much of Poe to be humorous - maybe dark, maybe mordant, but there is a sense of satire.

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