PORTLAND, Maine — The late founder of the Dead Poets Society of America can be inducted to the society of fallen bards now that he’s a published poet.
Walter Skold visited the gravesites of more than 600 poets, and one of his criteria was that the subjects had to be published. Now he’s become a published poet, posthumously, on the one-year anniversary of his death Sunday, thanks to the efforts of two of his children.
Simon and Charles Skold curated their father’s poems for the book The Mirror Is Not Cracked.
They self-published the tome to ensure it would be printed by Sunday, a year to the day their father went from being a chronicler of poets to becoming a dead poet himself.
“We feel like we owe it to him,” said Simon Skold, who once spent six weeks with his dad on one of his cross-country visits to poets’ graves in 2014.
Their father launched the Dead Poets Society in 2008 in Freeport, Maine, drawing inspiration for the name from the 1989 Robin Williams movie. And he traveled the country in monthslong, epic graveyard adventures in a colorful cargo van dubbed “Dedgar the Poemobile.”
His cemetery antics combined history, humor and the macabre, but his goal was to draw attention to poetry and poets, especially those in danger of being forgotten.
His death in Pennsylvania came a little more than a month after he commissioned Michael Updike, son of novelist John Updike, to create his tombstone.
In life, Skold marked occasions like birthdays and holidays with a poem. But he never published his works. Under the surface, his sons say, he was plagued by selfdoubt and prone to periods of depression. He kept the bulk of his poetry to himself.
His sons realized after his death that he’d amassed about 300 poems.
“I was afraid it would be a sentimental gesture, but it rose way above that mark. It’s a very solid book,” said Michele Madigan Somerville, a poet and writer who got a sneak peek at the poetry. “I was surprised to see how good the book was.”
A Section on 01/21/2019