My Day of Edgar Allan Poe
Coincidences, I Admire Them Indeed!
Zigzagging my way to the subway after running an early morning errand, I walked past a pair of large crows perched on stone plinths flanking the entrance to a residential building on 84th Street near Broadway. A plaque behind one of the crows caught my eye and I turned back to read it,
Edgar Allan Poe
and his family lived in a
farmhouse on this site
during 1844 where he
finished writing
“THE RAVEN.”
Ah, they’re ravens, not crows. I took the requisite photo for my collection of city trivia. How was it possible that I had never seen them before? I knew about Edgar Allan Poe Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive, but I couldn’t recall seeing the ravens. Maybe I had come across them at a time when I had little interest in literary landmarks.
That same morning, not long after I got to the office, a colleague shared a press release about a professor’s list of can’t-miss sights on the Columbia campus. She jokingly asked if I had been consulted for the article. My infrequent campus tours to our new staff have developed a bloated reputation as the years go by. They cover the same ground as all the others: Alma Mater, the Sundial, the building from the asylum days, and the improbable trajectory of Lou Gehrig’s blast towards Journalism. I presume it’s the personal tidbits I sprinkle in that make them memorable, like watching the Ramones play at Wollman Auditorium, a venue that no longer exists. The kicker is that the place was only about a third full. And, that only the band and roadies wore Ramones t-shirts. The Arturo-Vega-designed t-shirt became a fad later. Much later.
The press release moved on to a story of said faculty’s search for the Raven Mantle, the lost mantelpiece from the room where Poe wrote the famous poem. The Raven, again? Twice in just a few hours?
—I looked to the windowsill to check for birds congregating.
Apparently the mantle had been acquired by the university at the turn of the 20th century. The professor, Michelle Young, eventually found it in Butler Library once she asked the right people, the librarians in Butler Library. She should have started there. They know everything. To the professor’s credit, the mantle is now prominently displayed in the Rare Books Library, rather than the pride of some back-office staffer.
I was still smarting about the two Poe-related happenings when that evening I showed my father-in-law the photograph of the ravens on 84th Street. He had arrived earlier that day, visiting from Florida. I had heard him quote lines from The Raven, “Lenore — / Nameless here for evermore.” He proceeded to tell me about Poe’s room (West Range №13) on the University of Virginia campus — my father-in-law is an alum. The room is kept like a shrine to the writer, he said. It is maintained by The Raven Society, I looked it up. I had no idea that Poe had been a Cavalier.
The one-day EAP hat-trick was beginning to thump, thump in my head.
The next morning, before anyone was awake, I went back to Mary Oliver’s collection of essays, Upstream, the book I had been reading. Just after her excellent case for why Emerson is her best friend, she moves on to the essay, “The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible.” Oliver expounds on the centrality of the eye in Poe’s stories. The eyes of his women; “the vulture eye” of the old man.
I yelled out, this can’t be —
“The ringing became more distinct: — It continued and became more distinct…”¹
“Coincidences!” I shrieked, “assemble no more! I admire them indeed! — what is the chance? here, here! — How fortunate, this happenstance!”¹
¹ Quote and parody from “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe
