This was mostly written on 19 January, which is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe.

The earliest spark for this came from reading an article a while back about the so-called 'Poe-Toaster' of Baltimore, and a subsequent attempt to google-search the term "Poe Toaster", and I got the oh-so-helpful prompt: "Did you mean poetaster?"
Ouch.

It's also just a bit of a play on language similar to some of the things I toyed around with in my four-part beat poetry piece "Nomads" that I did a while back, where I made the observation that nowhere can also yield now here, not here can also be no there, and no matter how much we try to go there, we somehow got here.

The problem is that Poe-Toaster doesn't really make "Poetaster" without eliminating the extra "O". Poe-Toaster can however, yield "Poet-Oaster", which I suppose can refer to the stereotype of the drunken writer or poet, simply because "Oast" is a Middle-English term that refers to the oven in which hops are dried during the beer-making process. So, perhaps a poet, who prefers to get drunk on their own beer could also be a "Poet-Oaster", just like a budding poet getting their first taste of Poe and becoming a Poe-Taster could also be a Poetaster, as well as a Poet-Aster.

Asters, of course, are Autumn-blooming, purple-coloured perennial flowers known in the British Isles as often being the only flowers still blooming around Michaelmas, which has led to them sometimes being called: "Michaelmas Daisies".
There is also a tie-in with Poe in that the date of his death in Baltimore (under still-mysterious circumstances) on 7 October 1849 fell between Western Tradition Michaelmas (29 September) and Eastern Calendar Michaelmas (8 November). Hence, perhaps asters blooming around the date of Poe's death, and laid on his grave by an aspiring poet could indeed be poet-asters laid in homage by the Poe-taster poetaster.

Yet another loose tie-in also comes from Joanna Newsom's song: "Inflammatory Writ" off of her 2004 Album: "The Milk-Eyed Mender", which has several rather memorable lines that include the phrase: "Hand that pen over to me, poetaster!"

On that same album, Newsom also covered the traditional song "Three Little Babes", which itself was based off the much older traditional folk song/poem "The Wife of Usher's Well" (Roud Index 196), which also brings to mind Poe's similarly titled piece "The Fall of the House of Usher", although the subject matter of the respective pieces is quite different.

In the folk song "The Wife of Usher's Well" (as well as its derivative piece "Three Little Babes"), the aforementioned wife has three children, who she sends to a far-off country in order to attend school, and she learns some weeks later that they had died. All known versions of the song/poem draw upon an old folk belief that mourning the dead for longer than the traditional "Year-and-a-Day" may cause the dead to return as revenants, which the Three Little Babes indeed do, around Martinmas. She prepares them a table of bread and wine, and makes up their beds with fine sheets, but they constantly remind her that they can neither sleep nor eat, being dead, and they must likewise depart before dawn. Hence, instead of the joyous reunion she prayed for, it is a sad and bleak event, where she is forced to finally let them go.

Martinmas occurs in the Traditional Calendar on 11 November, just after Eastern Michaelmas, (11 November, of course, also being Veteran's Day/Remembrance Day).

The Poe-Toaster was an unknown individual (or series of individuals), who, from 1949-2009, would show up at the cenotaph in Baltimore, which marked the site of Poe's original grave in the early morning hours of 19 January, (Poe's birthday), dressed in black with a wide-brimmed hat and white scarf. The Poe-Toaster would pour himself a glass of Martell cognac, raise a toast to Poe, and then vanish, leaving the bottle of cognac behind, as well as three red roses laid in a distinctive pattern.

Obviously, I can't say whether or not the mysterious Poe-Toaster was also a Poet-Oaster, even if a Poe-Taster can yield a Poetaster, or Poet-Aster.

(or maybe it's all just a bit of dumb, lame attempts at humour on my part). :P

One final piece of inspiration comes from a three-panel online comic The Oatmeal did a few years back with the title: "How To Be A Writer"

It listed:
STEP 1: Drink.
STEP 2: Hate Yourself.
STEP 3: Just keep doing that.

Maybe I'd be a better writer/poet if I drank more? :P