Magnetic Poetry Kits started with a sneeze. The inventor of the pop culture phenomenon, Dave Kapell, hoped to alleviate his writer’s block as a struggling song writer by using the cut-up method. Cutting up a random variety of sentences from newspapers and magazines and rearranging them into something else sparked his creativity. In fact, Kapell sneezed into his pile of words and they scattered. In order to stop more nasal eruptions from erasing his work, Kappel glued magnets to the back of his words and stuck them to a spare cookie sheet. The creation of magnetic poetry was a hit! Twenty years later, Kapell has sold over three million kits, and designed themed collections of prose to each and every niche of people.
One such themed kit, punned “Edgar Allan Poet,” contains Poe themed vocabulary from his work, marketed to consumers for their “tormented poet within.” Magnetic Poetry INC. sells this particular kit for 12.95 USD, a typical price for all themed kits. Many poetry kits are modeled after famous literary giants, such as, The Brothers Grimm, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. The Edgar Allan Poet Kit comes in a small cardboard box, four inches long, two inches wide, and one inch tall. A size comparable to large matchbox. The front face of the box displays a raven inked in black, and boasts “a box of words filled with mystery and fear” and claims “over 200 macabre word magnets.” The box illustrates, underneath the crow, an example of the poetry a customer can create, using the slogan “the echo of a scream or was it but a dream.” The front face of the container flips up to display a transparent window showcasing the vocabulary of Edgar Allan Poe. The cardboard on either side of the window displays a portrait of Poe in black and white. Muted tones of cream, black and deep purple decorate the box, and the inside cover contains a marketing summary of the contents. The creators boast: “The hidden tell-tale heart, the raven’s haunting cry, the evil presence lurking everywhere… Poe created a world of gothic darkness. And you can enter that world through the Magnetic Poetry Edgar Allan Poet kit. Open up this box, hear the dogs howling in the distance, and release the tormented poet within.” The statement panders to the stereotypical view of Poe as a tortured soul, plagued by the horrors of his mind. The “raven’s cry”, “howling dogs,” and “evil presence lurking,” channel typical plotlines of gothic fiction, however, these tropes oversimplify Poe’s presence as a famously tragic literary figure.
The kit contains over 200 borrowed terms, stamped on rubber-like magnets, that must be torn and separated by hand. The creators further stereotype Poe’s work by including many typical “Poeisms,” or vocabulary associated with his works. Concepts such as, “nevermore, tell-tale, crepuscular, amontillado, darkness, crow, heart, dream, quoth, raven, and mystery” are included. The kit also contains “dreary” terms that remind readers of Poe’s gothic style, including, “forebode, death, shroud, mourn, howl, pain, evil, and melancholy.” These expressions stem from many popular Poe stories including “The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado,”“The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Customers are expected to be inspired through prose recycled on magnets to create their own gothic poetry on refrigerators and other metal surfaces. The illustration of the raven, front and center on the box, alludes to Poe’s most famous poem, and Poe’s infamous portrait, arms crosses and unsmiling, emulates his presence forever stamped on the cardboard.
Poe himself wrote a short story, titled “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” detailing exhausted sensationalized tropes of most gothic horror writings. In this short story he creates a frame narrative around incompetent writers that structure their stories in expected and obvious ways. Much like the main protagonist, Signora Psyche Zenobia, the customers who purchase the Edgar Allan Poet kit will actually receive a How to Write Like Poe Manual. The kit provides them with Poe’s essence in a box, which encourages consumers to transform into Poe themselves. However, like Zenobia, the end result of such blatant plagiarism usually presents more problems than solutions. Remember, Zenobia hysterically finds herself decapitated while following “how-to” instructions for gothic inspiration[1]. Similarly, searching for inspiration through Poe’s poetry kit will not lead to improved sophisticated style. The consequences of Zenobia’s ventriloquized voice, as Poe’s critique through her, are that writers, instead of creating their own narratives, exploit obvious clichés and “lose their heads” over embarrassing repetitions.
The intertextuality of the Poet kit presents problems with originality. The creators of the kit quite literally want consumers to use Poe’s vocabulary in their own work, which lessens the significance of Poe’s stories. These magnetic Frankenstein poems, stitched together with good intent, will never become more than a silly gimmick on a refrigerator. By using pieces of Poe’s prose, the admirer creates perhaps a monster of metafiction, one of which even Poe would abhor. Poe was a lover of complexity, but forcing his stories and verses into inorganic texts shows no originality or imagination. This type of poetry-by-numbers inhibits customers from learning and appreciating Poe’s art. Instead they partake in a sensationalized and commercialized Poe. Finally, the creators of the kit aim their product towards the diehard literature lovers. The Edgar Allan Poet Magnetic Poetry kit forces consumers to see Poe only as the tortured artist forever fixated on the macabre. They twist Poe’s biography to fit their easy narratives in order to fill their pockets, which creates an authorial fallacy. In fact, many Americans assume Poe writes gothic fiction because his young wife died and he turned into an alcoholic who drank himself to death, forever a tortured soul. This biographical reading has cemented his legacy as a brooding, twisted drunk. The Edgar Allan Poet kit oversimplifies the extensive collection of Poe’s work, encourages plagiarism and unoriginality, disregards Poe’s principles of complexity, intelligence, and imagination, and finally wrongly paints Poe as little more than the sum of his cut-up best lines. However, Poe is more than a tortured soul, more than a useless drunk, and more than the caricature of a man Magnetic Poetry INC. wants us to remember. Albeit Poe’s legacy thrives on the black bird forever perched on his shoulder, and the thumping heart underneath his feet, he represents more than the words “nevermore,” “tell-tale,” and “raven,” forced upon his legacy, but no magnetic poetry kit will ever be able to explain why.