WELLVERSED

BY JESS SWANSON

P. Scott Cunningham is on a mission to have every Miamian discover a new poem this month. Forget the fact that Miami-Dade County harbors more than 2.6 million people. Disregard that April (which happens to be National Poetry Month) only has 30 days. Cunningham is not deterred. The founder of the annual O, Miami poetry festival is inspired by the city, its residents, and their penchant for crafting poignant verses about the place they call home. But it hasn’t always been that way. “When I started the festival [in 2011], I was way more pessimistic about people’s relationship to poetry,” Cunningham admits. “The festival taught me very quickly that I was completely wrong. The big lesson was that people in Miami have way more faith and belief in poetry than I did.”

Cunningham and his team have taken a subversive route to investing in verse, publishing poems by locals in and on the most unexpected places: Metrorail stubs, urinals, soap dispensers, the sand, sky banners, road signs, gas pumps, and even parking tickets. In 2016, they displayed a poem written by Orchid Villa Elementary School third-grader Nieema Marshall on a Wynwood roof large enough for airplane passengers to see: “I am from a place where it does not snow.”

“We realized it’d be way more meaningful if the poems came from Miami,” Cunningham says, “and that our role should be to collect poems 11 months of the year and then do projects in April to platform these voices so that people can hear their communities speaking back to them.”

This year, Cunningham is excited about publishing a local’s poem on a billboard outside the Miami-Dade Arena following a monthlong call for submissions. The Poetry & Pajamas event (in which children can recite their favorite lines to pajama-clad peers) will return, as will Zip Odes, a call for short lyric poems from every zip code in South Florida.

“The most rewarding part is when you come across a poem that just resonates with you, even though you didn’t write it and it comes from someone with vastly different life experiences than you,” Cunningham says. (omiami.org)

Read Between The Lines

Our picks for three Miami poets making their mark

The 44th of July by Jaswinder Bolina

A professor at the University of Miami, Bolina has published a collection of poems about American culture as seen through the lens of an outsider. It was longlisted for the 2019 PEN American Open Book Award.

Miami Century Fox by Legna Rodríguez

Iglesias

XCuban-born Rodríguez Iglesias’ collection of ironic and absurd poems looks at Miami and the immigrant experience in the twenty-first century. It won the 2017 Paz Prize for Poetry.

Hour of the Ox by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

A program coordinator for the Miami Book Fair, Cancio-Bello’s collection examines distance, wanderlust, and grief. It received the 2015 Association of Writers’ Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, among other awards.