The Mask of the Red Death
by Harry  Clark - 1919 (from a story of that title by Edgar Allan Poe)

Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19, 1809 and  Died, October 7, 1849.
2009 is Poe's 200th birthday anniversary.  Celebrate  this year with Ravens, Amontillado, and fair ladies named Lenore...

The Editrix(i) of Starlit Tales takes this opportunity to challenge one and all to write a tribute to the man who has been call "the most famous American author who has ever lived".  Your tribute will be published in future issues of Starlit Tales. You can submit it by email or a you-tube video. Entries may include: A poem or prose pastiche, a song or other composition, a short play or film,  or a piece of art (any media - even a whole website). For very long works, we'll put a paragraph in the newsletter along with a URL.
This site does not - yet- support audio files, but a URL to a audio file will work (such as an MP3 or .wav file on your website, My Space, or CD Baby site).  Song lyrics will be added permanently to the TSCP songbook (with accompanying sheet music &/or tab), so everyone can see (and, sing) your brilliant creation. The Beste of the Lotte (by consensus of our readers) will be performed at a TSCP event, and the author will receive a bottle (probably not a whole cask) of the best Amontillado we can obtain at Trader Joe's.


The Edgar Allan Poe museum can be found here, http://www.poemuseum.org/poes_life/index.html, where you wil find much in the way of inspiration...



by the way this is also Darwin's 200th birthday, interesting.

Q: What did the math book say to the other book?
A: I have a lot of problems.
In the theme of EAPoe
Our high school English teacher meant well.  Unfortunately, the way she hit upon to make Poe “come alive” was to have the class split into sopranos and baritones and spontaneously recite his worst poem, glee-club style.

The following is a true story.

Once upon a school-day dreary, while I nodded, vague and weary,
Wond’ring at the dull, monotonous verse that English class compels,
While I sat there, no harm doing, doodles on my desk construing,
Suddenly some girl came shooing me across the room with yells,
Growling, squawking, shushing, shooing all across the room with yells;
“Hey!” I muttered; “What the hell’s–”

Little did I know what dire circumstances loomed, or why, or
Whether I should scowl or sigh, or what ill such tumult foretells;
Late I rued my inattention, and despaired of intervention
When I fathomed what unmentionable noise so loudly wells –
What a monstrous travesty of sound so sinisterly wells:
Choral reading of “The Bells”!

For it’s “bells”, and “bells” it echoes, till the room seems filled with geckos
Teeming, screaming out the morbid music of a thousand hells –
Burrowing into the cortex, roiling in a noisome vortex,
Casting iambs long and short ex tempore in seasick swells,
Sounding grunts and cackles like a coven’s dark incanted spells –
Such anarchy was “The Bells”.

“Never,” thought I, “breath’d such evil, since the wilderness primeval!
Even tortures medieval this bleak exercise excels!
Though upon the rack they rend you, low above the fire suspend you,
Neither it nor pit nor pendulum such grueling torment tells –
Never such excruciating lamentation as retells
-Choral reading of ‘The Bells’.”

Ghastly voices still are singing; in my ears continue ringing
Horrid tintinnabulations which no asp’rin pill dispels;
Through my brain those verses bubble, ev’ry syllable redoubled,
My redoubt reduced to rubble while that threnody still knells –
Rubble out of which is built the cell in which my soul now dwells,
In the Tower of “The Bells”.
Mitchell Random
Apologies (and curses) to E.A.P.