The Perks of Researching Authorship

CN: suicide

Like many people, I'm a big fan of Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I even translated the novel into German, and I taught it at university. And like many people, I was hit hard by the poem in the book, which is presented as "some kid's suicide note" and given to Charlie by his friend Michael who also kills himself at the beginning.

It has always been pretty obvious to me that the author of this poem is Dr. Earl Reum: after all, Chbosky thanks him in the acknowledgements:

"Dr. Earl Reum for writing a beautiful poem and Patrick Comeaux for remembering it wrong when he was 14."

However, there's a persistent rumor on the internet that the poem was an actual suicide note, and this rumor is increasingly drowning out more reliable sources because it gets upvotes on Reddit while said sources went offline and are only accessible via the Wayback Machine.

So for everybody who came here searching for the origins of the poem, here's a link to an old blog entry by Genel Hodges who served as executive director for the National Association of Workshop Directors, now the National Association for Student Activities , which was founded by Earl Reum in 1973.

In her words:

"I remember Earl reading this at several conferences. He used it most often with students. Mary Reum tells me they referred to it as The Yellow Paper, but it is now popularly known as A Person, A Paper, A Promise. Earl wrote so many things, but Mary believes he wrote this after a student committed suicide during his early years of teaching. He was very affected by the student's death and incorporated this in a lesson for other students. You know Earl. If someone liked something he wrote, and wanted a copy, he would see that they got it. Therefore it took some investigation before it could be traced back to Earl. It seems to have affected a whole new generation, and from a Google search it may have worked its way into homework and school papers. His legacy continues."

Note that the version of the poem she gives is identical to the one presented by Chbosky. This doesn't necessarily mean Reum never reworked the poem; Hodges might simply have chosen the most popular version when she wrote her blog entry in 2012. But the internet went crazy with these subtle differences. There are several versions of the poem around: often what is presented as the "original" poem is significantly shorter, the dog is called "Spot", the "damned" is replaced or omitted. Sometimes, the author given is "Osoanon Nimuss" (sic) and the original title is supposed to be To Santa Claus and Little Sisters. A Californian dental surgeon even published a novel of that title in 2011 that also presents the poem as some kind of "found footage".

It's a powerful device: spread a piece of poetry, invent a dark background story to it and claim you found it in some library, locker or cabin, or maybe some mysterious acquaintance gifted it to you and disappeared or even killed himself, like Michael in the novel. This is how urban legends spread. It's even a horror trope. And it's easy to imagine this happening to a poem that was read to and photocopied for thousands of teenagers in school or suicide prevention programs. By now, it has been spread by word of mouth, Xerox and Livejournal for half a century, and people like Patrick Comeaux will continue to (mis)remember it.

It will always be a powerful poem: not despite, but because of its hazy origins. No poem printed in an edited volume can ever be as alluring as this little piece of yellow paper (the color alone would be worth another blog post) speaking of forbidden things.

PS There's a claim on Goodreads from 2013 that in "Chbosky's commentary on the DVD of Perks ... he explains that he had to hunt down who wrote the poem in order to publish it in his novel because he didn't know who wrote it since he heard it when he was younger. His search led him to Dr. Reum who he spoke to about the poem. Dr. Reum explained that he wrote it and was a teacher who used it for his students and suicide awareness." I haven't been able to verify this claim: either I missed it in the commentary or there are several versions of the DVD; or maybe this piece of information has been misremembered, too. If somebody can help me out with this, please get in touch.