Beach Blanket Bards : Poetry: Students forsake typical Saturday night teen activities for sessions of verse and rhyme by candlelight.

The waves wash over the pitch-dark Del Mar beach with a graceful, calming rhythm, a fitting cadence for the words and wisdom to follow.

Crouching in a semicircle, candles held against the darkness, half a dozen teen-agers flip pages in their well-worn books, putting fingers to the title of a favorite work. And they wait.

Then Paul-Ryan Lake, a bespectacled 16-year-old, stands and carefully, purposefully, reads the opening lines to the poem “Oh Captain, My Captain”--Walt Whitman’s ode to fallen President Abraham Lincoln.

With that, the Dead Poets Society has solemnly come to order.

Each weekend, a loyal following of Torrey Pines High School students gathers in unlikely spots around coastal North County, spending their Saturday nights doing something most MTV-watching, mall-walking, popularity-minded teen-agers wouldn’t dream of.

They celebrate poetry.

Not only that, they discuss it, dissect it. And sometimes, they trash it.

Stanza by stanza, they read the works of such famous poets as Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling and even Dr. Suess. Often, they recite from their own writings--rhythmic lines read in machine-gun-rapid style about the impatience and frustration involved in living as an untested teen-ager in a complex world.

For these students, poems are pure emotion distilled, chiseled works of art as powerful and personal as any slick music video.

The Dead Poets Society is the brainchild of Elyse Salzman, a 16-year-old published poet who believed that, like the drama types and the computer set at her high school, the poetry people deserved an outlet for their passions.

“I’ve always liked writing poetry and reading the poems of the great writers,” said Salzman, a slight girl with thick, waist-length hair. “And I knew there were others out there with the same interests. We just needed a reason to get together.”

Salzman’s idea was to start a club fashioned after the 1989 film “Dead Poets Society,” which told the story of a charismatic English teacher (played by Robin Williams) at a stuffy New England prep school who uses poetry to introduce his students to the freedom and challenges of independent thinking.

In the movie, which is set in 1959, the eccentric teacher leaps onto desks to deliver electric speeches on the brilliance of the exacting imagery that good poetry offers, inviting students to gorge themselves on dreams and on the writings of Whitman, Shakespeare and Keats.

“Carpe Diem”--Latin for Seize the Day--was the teacher’s motto. And “Oh Captain, My Captain” is what he encouraged his class to call him.

It was exactly this kind of energy that Salzman wanted to capture in a literary club, “how students didn’t just talk about poetry--they breathed it to each other.”

Initially, however, few people--starting with her own parents--believed that Salzman’s club would ever get off the ground.

“We weren’t very encouraging,” recalled Carl Salzman, a Del Mar physician. “We told her that it just wouldn’t work, that no one would come, that she wouldn’t even be able to find a teacher who would become her adviser.”

But Elyse had no problem selling English teacher Holly Nordquest on her idea.

“What’s really unique is the idea of students enjoying poetry outside the classroom--sharing their own work and ideas,” said Nordquest, who became the club’s faculty adviser. “You just don’t find that very often.

“These kids are not a bunch of eggheads. They’re teen-agers who appreciate good writing, who have gotten together to slow down the hectic adolescent pace and look at life in a mature fashion. They’re creating their own dreamscapes. That’s something that even some adults don’t do.”

With the help of a few friends, Salzman set about advertising her new club. She distributed flyers around school where people would most likely spend a moment to read them--from bulletin boards to the inside of the stalls in the girls’ bathrooms.

One flyer featured “The Road Not Taken,” a poem by Robert Frost that is one of Salzman’s favorites. Another evoked the spirit of the late Jim Morrison, lead singer for The Doors.

Still another pictured a smiling rabbit and took a stab at capturing a typical high-school student’s fantasies of escape.

“In that year there was an intense visitation of energy,” it read. “I left school and went down to the beach to live. I slept on a roof. At night the moon became a woman’s face. I met the spirit of music.”

Maya Gurantz was one student drawn in by the club’s appeal.

“I’m sure some people walked by the flyers and didn’t give them a second thought,” said the 15-year-old sophomore. “And then there were people like me who saw it and felt something click.”

As many as two dozen students showed up at the first handful of Dead Poets Society meetings earlier this year. They’re a cross-section of high school society--from pensive honor students considering Ivy-league colleges to borderline academic performers in long hair and leather jackets.

At some meetings, the students agree to disagree on exactly what a poem means. They argue about whether poetry should have rhyme and rhythm, or solely feature bursts of unstructured emotional and intellectual energy.

But the poetry club, Salzman insists, has become more than just a reading session. On occasion, the poems discussed have opened raw wounds in the students’ own sometimes-troubled lives.

Club members have written poems on rape, loneliness, deaths in their families and academic pressures--some of which have been published in the school literary magazine and others given their first audience at club meetings.

There was even a work by Gurantz on the importance of duct tape as well as the much-discussed poem on her first menstruation entitled “Maya’s Ode to Femininity” that offers a cynical view of womanhood.

Like the all-male characters in the movie, some Dead Poet Society members at Torrey Pines High School have had messy run-ins with their parents and often chafe at the expectations that have been placed upon them.

“A few of the kids don’t have great relationships with their parents, a situation they want to avoid,” Salzman said. “In our club, we talk about things that we might not talk about with our own parents. We give each other a sibling understanding.

“In general, a lot of our issues include the idea that no one listens any more and that so many young people are becoming conformists these days, buying into the American Dream, the 2.5 kids, the picket fence.”

Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”--in which a solitary traveler makes a wistful choice--perfectly expresses the teen-age dilemma, even if it’s a decision of whether or not to go to the prom, members say.

“It’s a beautiful poem that says something about individualism and making your own path in life,” said Salzman, who has had her work published in a poetry anthology. “It’s a lesson in making choices.”

Deborah Gordon, 18, agreed that club meetings have made her think.

“Either you can ignore things that are going on in your head and simply turn on the television or you can start trying to figure the world out,” she said. “Poetry inspires my ideas to come out.”

So far, the club has met not only at the beach, but also at secluded spots at Torrey Pines State Reserve and San Elijo Lagoon. The point, members say, is to keep the meeting sites secret to inspire an atmosphere of illicit discovery.

In the eerie darkness of a recent Saturday night, the teens held flashlights to the books they had spread out across two blankets on the beach.

There are no rules. Taking turns, each student reads a favorite published poem or a sample from their own work.

After starting the meeting with Whitman’s poem for a dead president, Salzman reads a selection by Frost, wearing a cap composed of gift-wrapping ribbons she calls her medieval crown.

While others choose more modern poets, there are few works that would not have been read in English class--no homosexual writings from the 1950s, no works from the literary fringe.

That is, until whimsical, free-spirited Gurantz jumps to her feet to recite several of her own works, including her controversial ode to femininity--which, as usual, brings grumblings from some club members.

“That ought to be outlawed,” says one, under her breath.

Then Jimmy Lial, a quiet, 16-year-old student who likes science and says little at meetings, breaks his silence--reading his untitled poem about a nighttime walk in which he looked up and discovered the moon.

He hesitates at first, until someone says, “Go on, give it to us.”

After Lial finishes, club members contemplate his words in respectful silence, the cry of a train whistle and the lapping of the nearby waves the only audible sounds.

Then Salzman brushes sand from a book and reads a poem by Lord Byron, a work called “She Walks in Beauty,” in which the 18th-Century English poet marvels at the elegance of a cousin he had met at a party.

“Byron was a wild one,” she observes. “He was a bisexual who had lots of affairs. He’s as famous for his social antics as he is for his works. I guess he was like the Madonna of his day.”

Right or wrong, good poetry or bad, Carl Salzman is glad his daughter’s literary hunch has paid off.

“There’s a little bit of romance in all of these kids,” he says. “It’s a club about being a passionate romantic as much as it is liking poetry.”

As the night once again draws a curtain on the doings of the Dead Poet Society, the candles have burned low, leaving their wax fingerprints on books left open on the beach blankets--now littered with papers and pretzels.

A couple walking on the beach stops and listens for a moment to the group of teen-age literature lovers teetering on the cusp of adulthood.

As midnight approaches, young voices can still be heard:

“Stop kicking!”

“I’m not kicking!”

“You’re hurting me!”

“Can some of us move to the other blanket?”