My Sacred Places: Poe Sites in Baltimore

This is how it all began. When I was in secondary school, one of my favorite authors was Edgar A. Poe. Like so many young people, I was drawn to his larger-than-life plots. In graduate school, I studied Poe’s works. In the last year of my PhD work at IU, a friend in theater asked me if, for her graduate course in makeup, she could use prosthetics and grease paint to transform me into Walt Whitman, the subject of my dissertation. I consented. I had only to stand center stage in the auditorium while a judging panel evaluated the makeup under lights. The committee said that I looked so much like Whitman that I should consider performing a play about the poet. After completing my PhD in early American literature and taking a position at Northern Kentucky University, I began to research and write a script for a one-person play depicting Whitman and his works. I performed the two-act drama many times, but requests for the show were relatively sporadic. It was a chore to keep two hours of material memorized in between shows that were spaced a month or more apart. As I thoroughly enjoyed performing the part of an author, I decided that, to perform more often, I would choose a writer more popular than Whitman. I then composed a script for a play depicting the master of horror, Edgar A. Poe.

One of My Publicity Photos

Depicting Me in the Rôle of Edgar A. Poe

My play had no intermission. The enactment demanded prodigious energy. My purpose was to put before theatergoers an authentic Poe, not the Poe of popular culture. My Poe was neither a drug addict nor a drunk. My Poe was a writer’s writer. My Poe loved satire, had a towering sense of humor, screamed boo, winked, and smirked. My Poe changed costumes onstage to become the quirky narrators in “To Helen,” “Berenice,” and “The Raven.” My Poe quoted from his letters, essays, and reviews so as to give a nuanced depiction of the author. To change me into Poe meant a makeup process requiring between four and six hours. The style of makeup varied depending on whether the audience was close to me or far away, but the time it took to prepare Poe’s face remained the same.

My Sketch of Poe’s Raven

 

In the past forty years, eighteen actors have played the rôle of Poe on stage, according to writer Michael McGlasson. I offered a fully memorized and fully staged performance with an elaborate set. I gave over two hundred performances of my play A Dream Within a Dream during a dozen years. Thousands witnessed my drama. I last performed my play on Poe in 1994. Mine was not a costumed reading from a lectern—the form to which many Poe enactors resorted; rather, my performance was a ninety-minute, fully scripted show with a set and with a light and-sound technician.

“The Hour Glass of the Kings”

Illustration by Robert W. Satterfield

Page 1 of The Kentucky Post for Friday, December 10, 1915

For a Poe enactor, Baltimore is arguably the most important city in which to stand before the footlights. After all, Baltimore has Poe: his corpse, that is. Poe died in Baltimore on October 7^th in 1849 at the age of 40. Jeff Jerome of the Baltimore Poe Society named my play the authorized stage version of Poe’s life, and he brought my drama to Baltimore for performances on Poe’s birthday in 1988 and 1990. Both shows took place before standing-room only crowds in the deconsecrated church beside Poe’s grave. I was the performer in 1990 when Life Magazine secured an infrared photograph of the man who left cognac and roses on Poe’s grave. The photographer that Life hired took many pictures of my play, but none of them wound up in the magazine. After the performances, I led theater-goers in a toast to Poe beside his grave marker. What a thrilling experience that was! Anyone wishing to know more about Poe should visit the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, and anyone wanting to read a complete account of my play can see “In Poe’s Skin” at Rhode’s Books from the HeartLand.

Why I Plant Onions

The trick to growing onions is preserving them as long as possible after harvesting them. First, as the stalks of the onions begin turning yellow, you can leave the bulbs in the ground to be fattened for another week or, at most, two weeks. After that length of time, the onions may start to decay. Mine always pull out easily.

My Onions Dried and Hanging from a Nail in My Solarium

I stack them, stalks and all, on wire racks on a porch that gets plenty of sunshine in the morning and ample breezes throughout the day. I try not to let them touch each other on the racks. Depending on weather conditions, the onions need several weeks to dry. When the stalks are completely dry, I bunch the onions in clusters of five up to eight and tie clothesline cord or twine around the stalks. Next, I hang them in bunches over nails in my solarium. Whenever I want an onion for a recipe, I snip off a fresh onion from a bunch. By hanging them, I can keep the onions almost indefinitely. I have to be watchful because, occasionally, one will begin to rot—particularly if the drying period has been unusually humid.

The onions look homey hanging from nails all around my solarium. They remind me of my Quaker ancestors who, in the pioneer days long ago, put in good stores of vegetables and fruit to last throughout the long winter months. Although I am not necessarily a student of John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet, I admire his poem entitled “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174758. If you have not read it, you are in for a treat! Composed and published just after the end of the American Civil War, the poem commemorated life on a New England farm prior to the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution. The poem has been described as nostalgic, and I can see why; but I think that “Snow-Bound” was written in an era when, for many readers, the experience of an uncluttered home life around a blazing hearth in winter was ongoing or, at least, still fresh. For me, the poem is more nearly a clear snapshot than a rosy memory distorted by the passing of time. Each day that I notice my clusters of golden onions, I think happy thoughts of my upbringing on a farm. The onions evoke the joys of gathering in my mother’s warm kitchen on a December morning.

My First Edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Book Entitled

The Panorama, and Other Poems, Published by the Famous

Boston Firm of Ticknor and Fields in 1856 and a Look Inside

 

Onions provided a strange chapter in my life as a writer. My first published creative writing was a prose poem entitled “The Book of the Dead,” which appeared in Artful Dodge when the journal was brand-spanking new and originated from the creative mind of its founder, Daniel Bourne, in Bloomington, Indiana (before its move to Wooster, Ohio): http://artfuldodge.sites.wooster.edu/. Just before I left Indiana University with a newly minted PhD in hand, I submitted a second prose poem to Daniel. It was entitled “Onion Liturgy.” For reasons that now escape both Daniel and me, it was never published, but both of us remembered that it was. Odd! Several months ago, I asked Daniel for a copy of the issue that had carried it, and Daniel found that the poem had escaped being printed. No wonder I could not find the issue in my library! I could have sworn that it was published, but it never was! I have lost the poem, which is probably just as well because it likely suffered from being a spin-off of “The Book of the Dead,” which, for its numerous faults, had a certain idiosyncratic charm. As I recall, my concept for “Onion Liturgy” was that philosophy is like an onion that can be peeled, layer by identical layer, until there is nothing left except the memory of replication. Profound? Hardly, but I was young.

My First Published Creative Writing in Artful Dodge in 1980

That Was Supposed to Be Followed by a Sequel Entitled “Onion Liturgy”

So when I notice my onions hanging from nails, I feel—with satisfaction and relief—that I have come a long way as a writer since the days when I was first trying my tentative hand at composing poems.