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Kimberly and Ian Wilder will be reading Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry on Sunday, October 30, 2016 from 2pm to 4pm at Vines & Hops, 127 E Main St, Riverhead, NY 11901.
Other local writers who are part of the Riverhead Free Library Writers’ Cove will also be reading the short stories and poetry of Poe as part of the weekend Halloween celebration.
Why come out to hear Poe’s work?
If the judgment Day were fixed for the centenary of Poe’s birth, there are among the dead only two men born since the Declaration of Independence whose plea for mercy could avert a prompt sentence of damnation on the entire nation; and it is extremely doubtful whether those two could be persuaded to pervert eternal justice by uttering it. The two are, of course, Poe and Whitman; and there is between them the remarkable difference that Whitman is still credibly an American, whereas even the Americans themselves, though rather short of men of genius, omit Poe’s name from their Pantheon, either from a sense that it is hopeless for them to claim so foreign a figure, or from simple Monroeism. One asks, has the America of Poe’s day passed away, or did it ever exist?
And from “Edgar Allan Poe by William Carlos Williams from In the American Grain, New Directions Publishing, 1925 (fiction)
Poe was not “a fault of nature,” “a find for French eyes,” ripe but unaccountable, as through our woollyheadedness we’ve sought to designate him, but a genius intimately shaped by his locale and his time. It is to save out faces that we’ve given him a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classical accuracies we have not known how else to escape.
Filed under: Art, Calendar, events, Holidays, long island, News, poetry, suffolk county Tagged: | Edgar Allan Poe, George Bernard Shaw, halloween, library, nofo, peconic, Riverhead, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams
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