Dear Edgar Allan Poe,
Some questions about your imagination, and your death:
Why did Charles Baudelaire call your imagination the greatest of your century?
Why did Paul Valery think you incapable of making a mistake?
Why your obsession with crowds and cities (civilisation means "living in cities")?
Why were you obsessed with burying your lovers alive?
How did you die?
Were you beaten?
Was it staged, like the death of Kit Marlow?
Were you syphilitic?
Or was it just one final bender?
When they found your collapsed body,
why were you wearing another man's clothes?
Dear Poe, did you know that Thomas Jefferson was inviting
all of your class to dinner, alphabetically and in pairs,
but you dropped out of U Virginia
before he made it to the letter P?
What is your take on Humbolt's conception of the Cosmos?
Why does Dupin's love of reason lead to madness?
Why can a simple gold bug find the treasure?
Why did Vladimir Pyast, your Russian translator,
go mad while reciting "Ulalume,"
in a St. Petersburg theatre?
As the writer of split houses, family members buried alive, grief, the madness of crowds, mania, the petrification of a culture, the destructive turn to reason, broken harps, crimes without an logical motive, houses barricaded from the plague burning outside, the coming generations ignorant of the centuries of beauty and knowledge that precedes them: why, Edgar, did the Russians worship you so?
After you died the Baltimore Clipper announced your death as "congestion of the brain."
Were they actually talking about soaking our imaginations in yours?
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