This year’s O, Miami festival puts poetry in your face — and in other unlikely places
Perhaps you’ve noticed a rhyme while waiting for the bus, walking down the sidewalk or getting your oil changed. Maybe you’ve seen a line of verse projected on the front of AmericanAirlines Arena, below the Metrorail tracks, popping out of a gumball machine or printed on your vaccination Band-Aid.
It’s as if poems escaped their bindings, flew off bookshelves and alighted at unlikely spots throughout the city. It’s poetry at your fingertips, beneath your feet and in your face.
It’s the O, Miami Poetry Festival, fulfilling its mission to help everyone encounter and engage with poetry as part of their daily existence.
During April, National Poetry Month, festival organizers hope you’ll see their installations, attend their events and realize that poetry is everywhere, whether it’s the iambic pentameter of a train clacking along the tracks or the song of a mockingbird. Listen to the stanzas of a thunderstorm.
No need to be a Shakespeare scholar. The festival makes poetry accessible.
Gumball machines placed around Miami — it’s called “Chew On This” — offer powerful and wishful poems written by incarcerated people as part of the Florida Prison Poet Laureate initiative. Crack open the plastic bubble, like a fortune cookie, and read this poem by Emilio:
“O, Miami’s summer nights, the walls in my cell sweat.
10 years more of tears, paying society’s debt.”
Or this one by Max:
“Out my window is a tree
That begs to be climbed by me.”
From D. Juvie:
“Simple mathematics, when love is added, hate is subtracted.”
Your oil change at Leadership Service Auto Repair, 1700 Coral Way, includes a windshield sticker with a poem printed on it, like this one by Claire Traeger:
“The radio playing past memories reminds me to look to the future which shimmers out in front.”
Bus shelters display poems written by Carrollton School students in the festival’s “Zip Ode” form. For the 33133 zip code of Coconut Grove, that means five lines, with three words in the first line, three in the second, one in the third, three in the fourth and three in the fifth.
Here’s one by Emiliana:
“Peacocks crossing roads
Palm trees everywhere
Sailboats
Coming to shore
Carried by air.”
The most visible project, and the most audacious, is the brainchild of London-based artist Naho Matsuda. Entitled “This City is,” she’s organized the projection of social media snippets onto buildings. She’s stuck at home, so her team scrambles around Miami each night, finding suitable walls to act as screens. They’ve been chased away from a few sites. They’re like graffiti poets, using a projector instead of spray paint.
On the Pink Pussycat All Nude Revue sign, just below the neon-lit dancers, you might have observed: “This City is the only place that feels like home.”
On a white stone wall: “This City is like if Mountain Dew was a place.”
On the Miami Heat’s soon-to-be-renamed arena: “This City is a true masterpiece.”
It’s Miami described in stream-of-consciousness style. Naho and web designer Paul Angus created the thiscityis.com website that continuously updates statements pertaining to Miami every few seconds as they are scraped from Twitter, Reddit, Craigslist and various other online platforms. You can type in other city names and see what’s emanating from, say, New York: “This City is run by the mob,” followed by “This City is more tempting by the day.”
“I had this idea to capture a city using a mix of online voices, stories and reports and take it from the virtual world and put it in a real physical space where people could walk or drive by and wonder where it came from and what it means to them,” she said.
“These communications are constantly cycling through on our site, so a personal message will come up, then a commercial announcement, then a sports or weather update, then somebody trying to sell their sofa. The projectionist doesn’t know what’s going to come up at the time of the display and neither do we.”
At Bayfront Park next to Isamu Noguchi’s Challenger Memorial sculpture: “This City is more than downtown, go west of the Palmetto.”
Next to Bird Bowl’s sign advertising 65 Years of Family Fun: “This City is speaking for me.”
“I like the personal ones, and the ones in Creole and Spanglish,” Naho said. “Miami seems like a special city with all the different cultures and communities in one place.”
Poems are appearing on the Colony Theater art deco marquee, at the Redland Fruit and Spice Park, on Opa-locka streetlights and on COVID-19 vaccination bandages at Jackson Health System hospitals.
The “Poetic Drive” project conveys a sense of place along Sunset Drive and Killian Drive. Recordings of poems you can dial up on your phone “celebrate the thoroughfares that connect the city and all of us to one another, and the vision is to create more poems about more streets in Miami until the streets are filled with poetry.”
Decals stuck to the sidewalk pavement invite anyone to call 786-789-0048 and choose to listen to poems about traffic, strip malls, strawberries, memories, a rendezvous, the sun and a son.
At the Underline’s Promenade, 826 SW 1st Ave., 44 poems by the bards of local neighborhoods will be shown on a loop on an LED screen.
Leave the birches to Robert Frost. Miamians have their own “topics of urban greenspace and the subtropical ecosystem” to write about, according to O, Miami.
Here’s one by Kaia:
“Metrorail above
the rumble bumble of life
Suddenly quiet.”
And one by Alexandra:
“Crickets chirping
The night stars
are not seen.”
This story was originally published April 24, 2021 at 7:49 AM.
