Rescuing.

Poetry Foundation hunts the dead gods ...

Back in my final semester of graduate school, I and as many friends as would fit piled into a Subaru and drove from Boston to Hartford, Connecticut, one snowy weekend in February. We were going in search of Wallace Stevens. We were aware that the man had been dead for almost 50 years. But we wanted to see what he had seen on his weekday walk to and from the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, to visit the house where he resided from 1932 to 1955, and most of all to find his grave.

Wallace Stevens, King of Ghosts.

We walked the walk, we stared at the house (which you cannot go inside, because people still live there), we breathed the air and imagined that maybe the same particles had circulated through the lungs of Stevens. Then, not really knowing how to get there, we headed to the graveyard. Or, rather, to a graveyard. First we went to the wrong place: Beth Israel Cemetery. Beautiful, to be sure, and also historic, but, as the understandably suspicious caretaker explained, Stevens was not Jewish. In the early winter sunset, directed by the caretaker, we made our way to the right one: Cedar Hill Cemetery. We did not have a map, and no one was there to guide us. The snow was piled so high that only the top few inches of the headstones protruded. We had neglected to have a mind of winter. Locating Stevens’s remains seemed hopeless. As we dug among the drifts, the darkness became complete. We had been cold a long time, and more snow started to fall among the skeletal trees. The six of us soon found ourselves surrounded by hungry deer with no fear of us, their skinny bodies lit by the headlights we’d left on, the better to read the stones. In the yellow glare their eyes looked backless and unreal, and we started to freak out a little, like maybe the deer were revenants, like the place was filling up with ghosts and we shouldn’t be there, plus it was freezing and we needed to pee and we were almost out of gas and we were meeting people for dinner. We abandoned our mission.  

As the Dead Poets Society of America’s meticulously mapped 2010 tour indicates, Skold would not have been deterred by a little bit of snow and some creepy ghost deer. But who cares where a bunch of forgotten poets are buried? Why do I want to see these tombstones, and why does it make me—and the many people, including the nine state poets laureate to date who have participated in the DPSA’s activities—so pleased that the DPSA exists and is doing this? That Skold is, as he puts it, rescuing these poets from being “doubly dead,” for “not only did they die physically, but they suffered a second death when their works were consigned to literary oblivion.”

Skold’s fixation on dead poets seems fitting. Poets are sort of always already dead, consigned to literary oblivion even as they are living. All poets are dead poets, writing posthumously. Poetry is a dead art.