Friday, April 23, 2010

A day to honor poets? Quoth the raven 'Evermore'

PORTLAND, Maine —

A former clergyman who founded the Dead Poets Society of America as well as trafficked 15,000 miles to document the graves of poets has the brand brand new goal - to emanate the Dead Poets Remembrance Day on Oct. 7, the date master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe died.

Amateur producer Walter Skold of Freeport launched his brand brand new endeavor Friday, commencement the 22-state debate of the graves of depressed bards. He's enlisted 13 current as well as former state poets laureate to help drum up support.

His "Dead Poets Grand Tour 2010" kicks off on what's believed to be the anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth in 1564 with the communication reading during Portland's Eastern Cemetery, the funeral place of British as well as American sea captains cited in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "My Lost Youth."

"Of course, it takes the small chutzpah to contend we're starting the holiday," pronounced Skold, who left his pursuit as the open school record clergyman to aspire to his passions of communication as well as photography. "But we hold it's the unequivocally good idea, as well as we goal it catches on nationwide."

As in last year's tour, Skold will expostulate the boxy cargo van, dubbed the Poemobile, to graveyards. But this year, the 49-year-old Skold will be accompanied by the couple from Georgia who will movie the tour for the documentary they goal to make.

Having learned from past mistakes, Skold sought permission from cemeteries forward of time so there's no suspicion about satanic rituals or disrespectful behavior.

The thought of the day of observance was inspired by Skold's find which the nation's literary forebears have been neglected. Communities have readings during the graves of Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton as well as alternative famous poets, though many others are in risk of being forgotten, he said.

Wisconsin's producer laureate, Marilyn L. Taylor, pronounced Dead Poets Remembrance D! ay is th e wonderful idea.

"There's all kinds of memorial dates for things like National Potato Week or something like that," she said. "And we think it's time which the poets got the small recognition."

Tennessee's producer laureate, Margaret Vaughn, noted which April is National Poetry Month. She pronounced it would be good to have the day set in reserve to respect poets, as well.

"When people write speeches, it's poets which they quote many of the time," she said. "I think to take one day to unequivocally commend them would be great."

Since first the Dead Poets Society of America in 2008, Skold as well as others have documented the last resting places of hundreds of poets. All told, he has the list of the graves of some-more than 600 American poets.

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To drum up interest in documenting poets' graves, the photo as well as video contest will suggest $4,000 in esteem money, pronounced Skold, whose society's name was partly inspired by the 1989 Robin Williams movie "Dead Poets Society," about an radical English clergyman who inspires his boarding school students to love poetry.

For the trip, Skold has printed T-shirts with the rock tour-style list of stops, together with Abraham Lincoln's tomb in Springfield, Ill., the Poe Museum in Richmond, Va., as well as the Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, R.I., where Poe courted producer Sarah Helen Whitman. The furthest west he'll go is Iowa City, Iowa. Eventually, he hopes his travels strech West Coast cities.

Skold insists the cemetery events are about story as well as celebrating the lives of the poets, though he's not above the small cemetery humor. The society's motto is: "We Dig Dead Poets ... You Dig?"

Modern poets puncture the attention he's generating.

"Dead or alive," Taylor said, "I think which Walter is seeing to it which we gain the small higher form by this as well as additionally giv! e the si ncere respects to these people who have left prior to us as well as on whose shoulders we're all station as we write the 20th- as well as 21st-century poems."

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On the Net:

Dead Poets Society of America http://www.deadpoes.org/



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