It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee;

The rest...

My Junior English teacher in high school had a Poe fetish, we were sure that she had once dated him. We had to memorize Annabel Lee and, of course, The Raven.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

I hated it until I aged a few years and grew to love the memory of that old lady and her wisdom.

Visit us at

The Home

As a displaced Knoxvillian living in the Baltimore area, I must point out one of Bawlmer's great Poe traditions: the Poe Toaster.

In short, every year on the anniversary of Poe's birth, someone shows up at the grave, drinks a toast with cognac, and leaves three roses (for Poe, his wife and his mother-in-law), and the remainder of the bottle. This has been going on since 1949 (it has been passed from father to son, and many feel the son has sullied the tradition.)

As an aside, I will add that, at least at one time, since I'm not sure if its still there, there was a restaurant near the gravesite called "The Tell-Tale Hearth." Its slogan was "Pizza Worth Raven About". (It was good pizza, the pun aside.) It also had a spookily lifelike mannequin of Poe.

EDIT: I checked. The Tell-Tale Hearth went out of business ages ago.

The Titans?

Or would that be a literary I-llusion?

I'll bet a cask of amontillado that Balmer wins this battle.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
Hunter S. Thompson

I was introduced to Poe by my 5th grade teacher, Miss Rattery, who had us read "The Gold-Bug" as a class participation assignment. We were a bunch of nerds collected up in one spot so they could keep us under close observation, and we wrote secret code notes to each other from then on. I never figured out what the note from Gracie Efird said but the girls all laughed at me from then on.

I have taken my family on vacation to Sullivan's Island, the setting for the Gold-bug, and talked about pirates, treasure, and secret code pirate maps in the evenings. The WWII bunkers behind the park are still way creepy to go inside, but I do it every trip to Charleston.

I don't know who the Titans are named after, but I know that my brother, who at the moment lives in Clarksville, believes that the Nashville teevee people are too in love with the Titans.

But the bro's wife just got a promotion that means they are moving to Bawl'mer, so I'll probably be hearing a bunch of complaints about their tee vee paying too much attention to the Ravens and the Orioles.

This is a man who until five years ago had only lived in East Tennessee and rather loves his Vols.

Pam Strickland

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." ~Kurt Vonnegut

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.