On the big screen, the leader of theDead Poets Society at an all-boys prep school was an inspirational teacher played by Robin Williams. In real life, it's a balding amateur poet who drives around in his "Poemobile," visiting and documenting the graves of dead poets and calling attention to their works.
Walter Skold, founder of the Dead Poets Society of America, just finished a three-month road trip in which he visited the graves of 150 poets in 23 states. Skold boasts that he set a literary land speed record of 1.66 gpd (graves per day) over the course of his 15,000-mile journey...
"It's not really a morbid project but rather a way to honor our literary forebearers and to historically resurrect their works," Skold said...
Skold, 49, of Freeport, founded Dead Poets Society of America a year ago, leaving his job as a public school technology teacher to pursue his passions of poetry and photography. For his trip, he bought a used cargo van with a rack for cameras and supplies, shelves for books and a desk that, in a pinch, doubles as a bed.
Over the course of his 90-day journey, Skold visited the gravesites of giants of the poetry world including Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as lesser-known poets like Dudley Randall, whose Broadside Press published many leading African-American writers.
He's making a film documentary called "Finding Frost: Digging Up America's Dead Poets." Next year, he hopes to scout out America's dead poets buried in Europe...
"So many of these individual poets have such interesting stories and such interesting lives that I really feel it's a shame that they've been lost to our literary imagination or our literary history," he said. "I'm trying to bring back people's works and lives who have value and who have been forgotten for one reason or another."
