Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Putrid poetry
If your verse is the worst, this festival’s for you.
During this year’s O, Miami Poetry Festival, Judson Wright figures he’ll have little trouble picking the city’s badpoetry laureate. Submissions for his Bad Poetry Slam, an April 22 celebration of South Florida’s worst offenders of verse and rhyming couplets, have so far included an ode to a man urinating, a poem that lists a tightrope as a metaphor for life and a love poem to technology written in binary code.
The idea behind the Bad Poetry Slam, Wright says, is to celebrate the act of “trying, failing and risk-taking” in writing poetry.
“It’s all about people finding creative ways to give life to otherwise dead-on-arrival poems,” says Wright, the organizer of the event. “Even really good writers end up writing bad stuff sometimes, so this slam can show everyone that poetry is accessible to everyone.”
Easily accessible poetry is the mandate behind P. Scott Cunningham’s ambitious O, Miami, a poetic feast that will take over Miami-Dade County from Saturday through April 30 with some 35 lyrical events. Cunningham’s festival, now 6 years old, still carries the unenviable task of exposing the county’s 2.6 million residents to poetry, even if some of it is deliberately awful.
“We always get excited when you can encounter a poem in a public place people wouldn’t expect,” says Cunningham, whose festival is supported by the Knight Foundation.
To participate in the Bad Poetry Slam, participants should submit their worst stanzas to badpoetryslam@gmail.com (length: three minutes long when read aloud) by April 7, and include a performance idea based on the poem, Wright says.
“If all people did was just take turns reading bad poetry, it wouldn’t be enjoyable after a while, so we’ve added props and audience participation,” says Wright, of Cutler Bay, by day an editor for an educational-book publisher. “Bad poetry can’t just stand on its own.”
This year’s O, Miami will be distinguished by poetry in more surprising places than ever, Cunningham says, including on internet search engines. Along with literary gatherings all over Miami, there’s the monthlong poetry-byprisoners project ViewThrough, which aims to change Google’s search results for the phrase, “Miami inmates.” O, Miami’s View-Through website contains one-line poems written by adult inmates from the MiamiDade Correctional Facility that start with the phrase, “Miami inmates are … ” (Example: “Miami inmates are light of the world, bone of men.”) With enough users searching for these lines of poetry, Cunningham hopes future search results for “Miami inmates” will carry the poems.
Other highlights include Comedy Night With Joe Pera (8-10 p.m. April 27; $6-$11), recently named by Esquire magazine as one of 10 comedians to watch in 2017. The “Pooetry” project will feature a Pablo Neruda poem printed on dog-poop bags in six parks around Miami-Dade County.
The O, Miami Poetry Festival will begin 6-10 p.m. Saturday with “Singing in the Dark Times: Poetry & Social Justice at the Bandshell,” at North Beach Bandshell, 7200 Collins Ave. The festival will conclude April 30. A full schedule of events is at OMiami.org.