The Dead Poets Society of America

AP Runs National Story on Tombstone Design

Folks sipping coffee in papers all over the US on Saturday were treated to a great tombstone story. The AP ran a great piece on how Michael Updike is helping DPSA Founder, Walter Skold, design his tombstone.

Celebrate Dead Poets Remembrance Day

Dead Poets Remembrance Day, the national literary holiday dedicated to remembering our past poets, is a celebration of people in local communities who honor the poetic gift of regional and national poets. Groups can:

-- Meet at a poet's grave;

--Meet in a bookstore or library;

--Make the holiday part of an already-scheduled poetry reading or literary event;

As former Kansas Poet Laureate, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg said: "Long Live our Dead Poets!" 

Past DPRD events have been planned in conjunction with poetry associations and groups of like-minded individuals.

Poets Who Died in 2015

Here is a partial list of the (mostly) US poets who have died since the last Dead Poets Remembrance Day. It includes

William Jay Smith, James Tate, Franz Wright, Claudia Emerson, Mark Strand, Galway Kinnell, Ronald Loewinsohn, Henry Braun, Judith Kitchen, Rod McKuen, Richard O. Moore, & Tomas Transtromer.

We Are On The Road Until August 2nd

Follow Dedgar and Me until August 2nd, as we visit 90 graves and have a great time on the Graves of Southern Poets Grand Tour.

Additional Kerouac Gravestone Installed in Sept 2014

I don't know how I missed this news back in September last, but Jack Kerouac's literary executor installed a new, large headstone at the family lot in Lowell. I've just now come across this Boston Globe news article which talks about it. The main question I have, which is not answered, is why another stone, and why only with Jack's name? It almost seems to denigrate his sister, Jack's wife, to not have her name on it too?

From the article: " The simple inscription on the new stone — taken from Kerouac’s best-known book, the wanderers’ bible “On the Road” — was an easy decision, said John Sampas, Kerouac’s literary executor and Stella’s lone surviving sibling.

“I could have picked lots of things, but that was so succinct,” said Sampas, who on Tuesday morning inspected the freshly installed monument, which also bears Kerouac’s graceful signature.

A "New" Dead Poet for Women's History Month

As Rob Velella says in his post today regarding novelist and poet Mary Eleanor Freeman:

In her last few years, fame and success finally came to her; she and Edith Wharton were the first women officially elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (Hamlin Garland presented her with a medal of distinction on behalf of that organization in 1926).

Always love finding out about a "new" poetess, and sure enough, her grave is not far from Ginsberg's in New Jersey

Catching Up With Poets' Obituaries

I love this project, and all the fascinating people I meet, both living and dead, but the problem is that new poets are always dying! The task will never end until the end, and just when that is and whether it will happen by fire or ice I do not know!

Due to planning the next Great Grand Tour, I have fallen behind in posting news of obituaries. Fortunately, the Poetry Foundation keeps an ongoing list of their obituaries. 

2015 Grand Tour Begins at Poe's Grave May 30th

On Saturday, May 30th, the Graves of Southern Poets Grand Tour 2015 will begin in Baltimore. Check out the itinerary and meet Dedgar and me On The Road as we visit 90 poets' graves in 16 States. Somewhere on this epic literary journey we'll be reaching our 500th poet's grave in 6 years.

The readings we film and the pictures of tombstones we document will be part of our 1-of-a-kind historical archive and some of it will make it into the feature documentary film now in production: "Finding Frost: Poets and Their Graves."

Rebecca Gibbs : Laundress, Poet, Nurse

I never heard of this woman, born in Philadelphia, and memorialized in British Columbia. This project provides near-constant fascination and education. (Picture here,  credit Herb Neufeld) Read part of one of her poems here, The Old Red Shirt.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (b. Nov 5, 1850)

Her ashes are interred in a huge rock that is on the grounds of her former estate, in Short Beach, CT.

 

Ron Loewinsohn, writer and poet, (1937-2014)

From Berkeley Daily Planet : Ron Loewinsohn, well-known Bay Area writer and teacher, died in Berkeley on October 14 after a prolonged illness. Ron was a significant figure in the younger generation of San Francisco Renaissance poets, a group that included David Meltzer, Richard Brautigan, Joanne Kyger and others...

He introduced a course on the Beat Poets that focused on several writers he had known personally, including Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Denise Levertov. Ron was happy to teach about his old friends. His passion for teaching, as well as his witty asides and personal anecdotes, made him a popular, charismatic instructor. 

Poet Laureate’s Job?

From Delaware Online: (Oct 25) "Yet one of poetry’s many virtues,” she says, “is that it can fly both under and in full view of the radar. You read what’s on the page and you could think, sweet poem. But you read again and it’s raw, double-edged.”

I agree. The poem pats your cheek, then punches you in the gut. “Mystery and strangeness” is the great value of poetry, and all art that urges us to confront in our own terms what it means to be human. Art combats the de-humanizing forces in our lives, of which there are an overwhelming number.

I think about the hundreds of times the short poem “Western Wind” (by Anonymous) has both delivered me to myself and left me utterly bereft. I first fell down its rabbit hole decades ago.

And there’s this stealth bomber by the poet Issa, which arrives in the form of haiku:

New Year’s morning—

everything is in blossom!

I feel about average.

 

Some Background re: Dead Poets Remembrance Day

Background to Dead Poets Remembrance Day from Walter Skold on Vimeo.

Han Mac Tu's Tomb in Vietnam

Poets' graves are shrines around the world. Why is that? It is one of the questions I am trying to answer with my project. Why do YOU think it is?

"We are sorry that the uneducated retards blew up your only resting place." Pakistan, 2010 (?)

Sow flowers so your surroundings become a garden
Dont sow thorns; for they will prick your feet

If you shoot arrows at others,
Know that the same arrow will come back to hit you.

Dont dig a well in anothers path,
In case you come to the wells edge

You look at everyone with hungry eyes
But you will be first to become mere dirt.

Humans are all one body,
Whoever tortures another, wounds himself. 

"...confounded the end with the beginning".

(quoted from url) "A short video tour of Norra Begravningsplatsen ("The Northern Cemetery"), accompanied by a reading recorded by Regina Derieva. The graves of Regina Derieva (1949-2013), Ingrid Bergman, August Strindberg, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Alfred Nobel are presented in this video clip.

At the Grave of Mercedes DeAcosta

Dedgar whizzed through NYC recently and stopped at 4 poets' graves. One of them was the little known early lesbian/feminist poet & playwright, Mercedes DeAcosta, buried in Trinity Cemetery. (See pictures)

From a post about her love life: After Cecil Beaton accompanied her to the theater one night in 1930, he wrote in his diary that he sensed people looking at him and questioning why he associated with "that furious lesbian." She often boasted of her sexual prowess, saying "I can get any woman from any man." There was perhaps justification for Alice B. Toklas's observation, "Say what you will about Mercedes de Acosta, she's had the most important women of the twentieth century." Even though these women included Isadora Duncan, Eva Le Gallienne, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich, she is usually portrayed as something of a perverse psychopath.

Dead Poets Remembrance Day Events 2014 : SWEET

The celebrants at the various Dead Poets Remembrance Day events last week were so busy and blessed listening to great poetry and stories that taking taking pictures was not a priority. Did manage to snap a few, however. Check them out, and over 5,000 other photos related to poets' graves, at our Flickr collections.

Carolyn Kizer (1925-2014)

Carolyn Kizer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose verse, overtly political and bitingly satirical, came, as she fondly put it, with “a sting in the tail,” died on Thursday in Sonoma, Calif. She was 89.

Ms. Kizer’s poetry is known for its wit, deep intellectualism and rigorous craftsmanship; its stylistic hallmarks include impeccably calibrated rhyme, near-rhyme and meter. It is unsentimental, at times unsettling, but also luminous and warm...

Ms. Kizer’s poetry could be autobiographical, spanning her childhood, her two marriages, the births of her three children and her friendships. But there was a steeliness to it — and a keen sense of humor — that distinguished it from the self-reflexive work of the confessional poets.

She was sometimes called a poet of love and loss, a description whose murky universality irritated her greatly, for what poet’s work, at bottom, is not about those things?

Nationwide DPRD Holiday Celebrations Taking Shape

DPRD is short for Dead Poets Remembrance Day and this year more and more folks are gathering to celebrate. As of Sept 28 there are 7 confirmed events, with more in the works. Check out the National DPRD blog for links to Amherst (9-4),

Concord (NH), Portland (ME), 9-10, Medford MA 9-7,

Baltimore 9-6, Philadelphia 9-5, & Pacific Grove, CA 9-4