Just say Poe.
Try it at the moment and you're smack in the middle of a mounting controversy.
In the Oct. 4-11 issue of the City Paper, local literary blogger Edward Pettit declared that Edgar Allan Poe, who flourished in Philadelphia but inconveniently died in Baltimore and is buried there, must be exhumed and reinterred in Philadelphia by 2009, marking 200 years since his birth.
Poe lived in Philadelphia from 1838 to 1844.
Baltimore Sun columnist Laura Vozzella replied with a caustic piece headlined "We Have the Body and We're Keeping Him!" Baltimore mystery novelist Laura Lippman groused, "What's next, a crab cake hoagie?"
Jeff Jerome, curator of Baltimore's Poe House and Museum, promised to punch Pettit "in the eye."
Philadelphia City Paper managing editor Brian Hickey nastily replied, "I'd expect nothing less from the syphilis capital of the universe."
At one minute after midnight on Sunday - notably after deadline - a dark-haired figure in black cape and boots tossed two sheets of paper into The Inquirer's lobby, then fled. They contained only a poem, written in black ink, apparently in third person:
"The War Over E.A.P." (With Apologies to My Darling, My Darling, Annabel Lee)
It was many and many a year gone by,
In a city gone way low,
That a writer there died and there may lie,
By the name of E. Allan Poe.
And this writer he died with no other thought
Than to rise, pack it up, and go.
*
Philly claimed him, as Bawlmor did too,
In that city gone way low.
But a blogger gave proof that was more than proof
Of who gets what's left of Poe.
And all Baltimore's zinged insults under Heaven,
Couldn't stop our big Mo.
*
And this was the reason that, late last week,
In the city gone way low,
A wind blew out of the Sun by day,
Distorting one Edgar Poe.
So that his Philly stalwarts came,
And warned the crab-eating foe,
With shovels they'll come down 95,
To the city gone way low.
*
The Net-head types, not half so happy online,
went nutty on us and Poe,
Yes! that was the reason (Harborites say),
In that city gone way low,
That the filth poured out of their mouths, tooting
while looting our E. Allan Poe.
*
But our bond it was stronger by far than the bond
Of those that The Wire might show -
Of Charm City-ers who say no -
And neither the boneheads in Bawlmor columns,
Nor those sure that grave-robbing is woe,
Can ever dissever our soul from the soul
of the Spring Garden E. Allan Poe.
*
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the reburied E. Allan Poe.
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the Comcastic E. Allan Poe.
And so all the night-tide, I line up by the side,
Of good Pettit, the blogger, our champ and our pride
In his piece that began this big row -
In his pledge to return Edgar Poe.
