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That's entirely appropriate here in the land of spooky moss, where the only thing we like more than waxing poetic is worshiping the dead.
The 22-state tour will take a chill in Charleston on May 13. It started Friday, led by a former school teacher who was inspired by the 1989 movie "Dead Poets Society" starring Robin Williams to found the Dead Poets Society of America.
Walter Skold of Maine hopes to enliven the nation's appreciation for its poets. He's pushing for a holiday, Dead Poets Remembrance Day, on Oct. 7, the date Edgar Allan Poe died.
Charleston and its moonlit islands waked Poe's macabre imagination.
Charleston is home to the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the nation's oldest organization of its type, established in 1920 to support the reading, writing, study and enjoyment of poetry throughout the state.
Today, Charleston poets live for the weekly open-mic night at the East Bay Meeting House. And Marjory Wentworth, the state poet laureate, lives there. She is to be filmed for the documentary that will be a legacy of the Dead Poets Grand Tour.
"What an unusual way to get people interested in poetry," Wentworth told me. "But so what? It's good."
Beaufort County's dead poets are good too.
We recently lost Walter Dennis, buried in the Beaufort National Cemetery. His words, banged out deep into the night on an electric typewriter, now live on the shelves of Beaufort County libraries.
Grace Morris Cordial, historic resources coordinator for the library system's Beaufort District Collection, says, "Among the (local) poets, living and dead, represented are: Robert Woodward Barnwell, Patricia Bee, Walter Dennis, Edith Bannister Dowling, Arthur G. Foster, Robert Elliott Gonzales, William J. Grayson and Gilbert Augustus Selby."
The grave of English-born poet and artist Edith Bannister Dowling lies in Beaufort's Parish Church of St. Helena cemetery next to her husband, G.G. Dowling. Her 2004 obituary tells us that about 80 of her poems won prizes, many of them from the Poetry Society of South Carolina. She published several books of poetry, including "One for Sorrow, Two for Joy" and "A Patchwork of Poems about South Carolina," as well as a collection of short stories and drawings titled "Tales: Mini, Midi and Maxi."
We love it when poets take us where shadows creep. And where the ordinary, like names Dowling discovered on Hilton Head Island, can be strung like pearls:
Fish Haul,
And Bay Gall:
Names in use down there --
Place-names, worn,
Like Honey Horn,
Through times both fierce and fair ...
Dead poets are silent now, but they can still take us on a grand tour.
