Norman Conquest

Selected Poems of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Norman Conquest

The thirteen strange poems penned by screenwriter/director Ed Wood during his lifetime will not be found in the Ed Wood, Jr. Collection at Cornell University. Cornell is home to the original draft of Wood's screenplay "Grave Robbers from Outer Space" (released in 1959 as "Plan 9 from Outer Space"), as well as his rare novels Killer in Drag (1965), Death of a Transvestite (1967), and others. There is not, however, a single shred of Wood's poetry. The only evidence that "the world's worst filmmaker" was also a poet of equivalent talent are several dozen rejection letters, including one from The New Yorker for a poem entitled "shreik" [sic]. According to Kathy O'Hara (Wood's second wife), the poet renounced his efforts as "pure crap" in 1968, and buried his thirteen unpublished works at the La Brea Tar Pits. A few days later, O'Hara attempted to retrieve the poems, but they had vanished from the unmarked grave. Wood subsequently coined the term "poesy-snatchers" to explain what had happened to his missing body of work. Nearly 30 years later the poems were discovered inside an abandoned flying saucer that landed in New Jersey.