Channeling Edgar Allan Poe
Written by Joie Colobong
The inner secrets of my battered heart,
I this dreary night to thee impart,
Such a tale of abject misery,
From which my forlorn heart cannot flee.
I ever walk alone upon the desolate shore,
Never to be immortalized or remembered in lover’s lore.
Only in the hallowed land of golden dreams,
Covered by silv’ry moonbeams,
Can I find the dear one that I love,
No more tangible than an ethereal angel from above.
My tortured heart’s been here so oft’ before,
And my breaking heart shall be trapped here evermore.
What you've just read are excerpts from “To ----, Upon the Shores of ----,” a poem written by English major Kara Nelson for Kirsten Mollegaard's ENG 488B course. This semester, students in this course have been gathering every Tuesday for three hours to study the works of the one and only Edgar Allan Poe, the author behind such famed literary works as “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. As part of the course curriculum, students were tasked to not only write a 25- to 30-line poem that emulated Poe's distinctive style, but also perform their poems in front of an audience at a poetry reading held in Campus Center Room 301 on Tuesday, October 28.
Nelson, whose poem features a narrator emotionally tortured by the heartbreak of an unrequited love, admits the process of writing her poem was a bit of a challenge. “First you agonize, how do you do it? How do you come up with a good poem, I guess,” Nelson says when asked about her approach to writing the poem. “So you're agonizing, What do I want to write about? How do I write it? And you have that kind of being torn between, Are you supposed to – Is it an art, like you're supposed to actually choose a particular type of form? Or are you supposed to write from your heart? Because I guess I tend to kind of wing it usually. I'm not, like, a slave to form, I guess.”
Despite this, Nelson had no problem with using the theme of love as the foundation for her poem. “To be honest, I usually do write about love, and I decided to go that route again because it was a good opportunity to do it,” she says. “And [Poe] writes about love a lot, and he captures that really dark, dismal side a lot. So it just kept coming together from there.”
After writing her poem, Nelson feels she has gained a deeper awareness of Poe's writing style, as well as an understanding of how she can incorporate some of Poe's techniques into her own work. “I feel like I have been able to know some more of his poetry than I did originally, that he has other worthwhile poems, and techniques and images that he uses,” Nelson says. “So I think now, especially with the teacher pointing out his adjectives and images, I feel like I'm a little more aware of that, and I hope I'll be able to do that in other poems – try to be more aware of things like adjectives, concrete images, and classical references.”
Fellow ENG 488B student and English major Daisy Willis, who wrote a poem revolving around Poe's relationship with his first cousin and wife Virginia Clemm, found it no more of a walk in the park to write her poem than Nelson did with hers. “Definitely, the most difficult part was deciding what part of Poe I was going to emulate in my poetry,” Willis says. “I've never written poetry for an assignment before, so being told to write poetry on a specific subject was really difficult for me. It was like forcing something that usually comes so naturally. So it was a really interesting experience.”
Unlike Nelson, Willis remained conscious about emulating Poe's style during the process of writing her poem. “If I hadn't have been, then it wouldn't have echoed Poe at all, because my poetry style is not the same as his. It's not as dark as his, or anything like that. The poem that I wrote was only for this class, and I'm not even sure it would really make sense to anyone who didn't know anything about Poe.”
Willis, a former Performing Arts major, admits that her nerves had been running on overdrive while reciting her poem to the audience, though she'd managed to do so flawlessly. “It's just a really big deal to share something that you've written, some original work, with people, you know?” Willis says. “It's different performing someone else's script than it is performing something that you've written, because it's all you. So everything they see is going to be something that you've produced, and all you can do is hope that they enjoyed it.”
Poe's works have inspired Willis to aspire to reach people in ways she hasn't previously been able to through her own writing. “I feel like my writing leans toward the darker side a lot of the time, but Poe's imagery is really inspiring for me,” she says. “I definitely want to be able to master his ability to bring to mind that really vivid scene of fear. And that's something that I find really difficult to invoke in my writing. I can write a tearjerker. I can write something that'll make someone laugh. But to write something that scares someone? That is a real challenge. And I feel like I've gained a lot of knowledge about how to do that from Poe.”
When asked about her thoughts on the assignment, Willis says she enjoyed it since it allowed her to connect with her classmates (and fellow aspiring writers) and their work. “I feel like writers are stereotyped as being really lonely, and locking themselves in their rooms and writing for a long time, and the way they reach the world is through their literature,” Willis says. “And I liked this event, and how it brought everyone together, because you get to see the writer behind the work. Whenever I read literature, I feel a part of the person that wrote it. And I love connecting with that person, even though I don't know them personally. And to see people perform their own work, it's an extreme connection, because you see not only their physical appearance, but what comes from their mind and their heart – that comes out in their poetry and their literature. That's definitely my favorite part.”
