Charleston Currents

Lighthouse at Hunting Island State Park.

SC ENCYCLOPEDIA: South Carolina’s lighthouses

S.C. Encyclopedia | South Carolina’s 180-mile coastline is replete with bays, inlets, and harbors. To assist shipping and aid navigation, lighthouses and beacons have dotted the South Carolina coast for centuries. The earliest warning lights were probably bonfires lit to aid ships entering the harbor at Charleston. South Carolina’s first lighthouse, built in 1767, stood on Middle Bay Island (now a part of Morris Island) in the Charleston harbor.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 11/06/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

SC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Marjory Wentworth, poet laureate

Editor’s Note: For the last five weeks, we’ve profiled South Carolina’s past poet laureates. Here is a look at our current poet laureate, who also is a contributing editor to Charleston Currents. Wentworth curates a monthly South Carolina-related poem in our Palmetto Poem section. S.C. Encyclopedia | Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 3, 1958, Marjory Heath Wentworth is the […]

by Charleston Currents · 10/30/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: Bennie Lee Sinclair, poet laureate

S.C. Encyclopedia | Bennie Lee Sinclair was born on April 15, 1939, in Greenville to Graham Sinclair and Bennie Ward. While she was in the first grade, her first published poem appeared in a teachers’ magazine. Overwhelmed by the attention she received, she stopped writing poetry and returned to it only after the deaths of her father and her brother. A 1956 graduate of Greenville High School, Sinclair entered Furman University, where she received her B.A. in English and later received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1996. In 1957 she married Thomas Donald Lewis.

by Charleston Currents · 10/23/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

SC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Grace Beacham Freeman, poet laureate

S.C. Encyclopedia | Born in Spartanburg on Feb. 18, 1916, Freeman was the daughter of Henry Beacham and Grace Bailey. She attended elementary and high school in the Spartanburg school system and received her undergraduate degree in English, drama, and Latin from Converse College in 1937. In 1993, she received an honorary doctor of letters degree from St. Andrews Presbyterian College.

by Charleston Currents · 10/15/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: Ennis Rees, poet laureate

S.C. Encyclopedia | Poet, literary critic, translator, children’s author. Ennis Samuel Rees, Jr. was born on March 17, 1925, in Newport, Virginia, to Ennis Samuel and Dorothy Drumwright Rees. He received his A.B. from the College of William and Mary in 1946, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa and where he received the Botetourt Medal for distinguished scholarship. The same year he married Marion Ensor Lott.

by Charleston Currents · 10/09/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

REVIEW: Miss Hokusai, a film directed by Keiichi Hara

Tama R. Howard: O-Ei Katsushika “narrates” this incredibly beautiful film that spotlights the strange life and long career of the famed Japanese painter, Hokusai Katsushika.

by Charleston Currents · 10/02/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, Reviews

PALMETTO POEM: Stagnation (a letter 2 America)

By Marcus Amaker, poet laureate of Charleston, S.C.

Amaker (Image by Lisa Livingston)
America has built
too many monuments to war.
Man-made maladies
mounted on Mother Earth.
I’ve seen scars on the skin
of our country’s landscape –
blood-stained band aids
covering exposed bones;
a pain that has not healed.

by Palmetto Poem · 10/02/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, Palmetto Poem

SC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Helen von Kolnitz Hyer, poet laureate

S.C. Encyclopedia | Helen von Kolnitz Hyer was born on Dec. 0, 1896, in Charleston, to George von Kolnitz and Sarah Holmes. She attended Simmons College from 1917 to 1918 and married Edward Hyer in 1921. The couple had four daughters. From childhood she had a love of poetry and memorized poems from a book of nineteenth-century English verse, reciting them to visitors at her grandparents’ home in Mount Pleasant.

by Charleston Currents · 10/02/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

REVIEW: A Really Good Day, by Ayelet Waldman

Jen McQueen: “Writer Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother) tried everything – meditation, psychotherapy, therapy, and prescription drugs – to treat her depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and mood swings. Yet despite years of effort, this talented and successful woman continued to drive herself, her friends, and her family – including a saintly husband, the writer Michael Chabon – bonkers.”

by Charleston Currents · 09/25/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, Reviews

S.C. ENCYCLOPEDIA: Archibald Rutledge, poet

S.C. Encyclopedia | Archibald Rutledge was born in McClellanville, South Carolina, on October 23, 1883, the son of Henry Middleton Rutledge III, an army officer, and Margaret Hamilton. Descended from a lineage of notable South Carolinians, Rutledge included among his ancestors John Rutledge, Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Thomas Pinckney.

by Charleston Currents · 09/25/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia