The following is Part 2 of O, Miami: How a festival infused a city with poetry. Click here for Part 1 or Part 3. 

“We wanted to saturate the city with poetry, to create moments of rupture in someone’s day.”

That’s how P. Scott Cunningham explained the charged mission of his O, Miami poetry festival. For its month-long debut in April 2011, the ambitious goal was nothing less than introducing every single one of greater Miami’s 2.5 million residents to a poem. RELATED LINKS

Interactive Report: knightarts.org/omiami

Downloadable Report: O, Miami Report PDF  

“We didn’t want to just rally the existing audience,” Cunningham says. “That would be unsatisfying.” Moreover, with a grant from Knight Foundation in hand, Cunningham wanted to fully embrace Knight’s ethos of “recontextualizing art for a new audience.” Of course, finding a new local audience for poetry wasn’t simply an option — it was a necessity. Miami’s die-hard poetry crowd was far too small to support a traditionally-modeled festival.

“The poetry world has expanded dramatically, but it’s still a closed circuit,” observes Billy Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate and arguably the most commercially successful poet writing today. “If you go to a hip art gallery show, most of the people there aren’t painters — they’re people who dig art.” By way of contrast, he invokes New Jersey’s bi-annual Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. In terms of sheer crowd size, he continues, it’s a success. “But even at the Dodge, where 20,000 people attend, I’d suggest that over 18,000 are either poets or wannabe poets. If you went to the opera and everyone in the audience was dressed up as Brunhilda, or if you went to the ballet and everyone in the audience had their tutus on, that’s the real trouble with American poetry.”

Which begs the question: Given poetry’s hermetically-sealed state, why even bother funding a full-fledged Miami poetry festival? Why not simply add a few more poets to the already-established annual Miami Book Fair? Those are fighting words for Cunningham.

 “Poetry matters now more than ever,” he insists. “We live in a world that is hyper-saturated with text. It’s all around you, all the time, whether it’s being online, using Twitter, or sending a text message.

“If the purpose of art is to provide reflection, or to get us to slow down and rethink things, poetry is the thing that does that for text. It tries to find meaning, to make the familiar strange, and the strange somewhat familiar.”

The way to broaden poetry’s appeal, Cunningham reasons, is to step outside of its traditional channels.

Cunningham’s own love of poetry is a testament to this stealth approach. He dates his own passion for the form with discovering a Billy Collins poem on the wall inside a Manhattan subway car during the late 90s — part of the Poetry Society of America’s “Poetry in Motion” project. (“I like this idea of being ambushed by poetry before you can get out your anti-poetry deflector shields,” says Collins, a society vice-president.)

With that example in mind, Cunningham reached out to a brain trust that included Miami Beach poet and Florida International University professor Campbell McGrath, poet and Fulbright Scholarship Board chairman Tom Healy, and Miami Book Fair co-founder Mitchell Kaplan. They pondered how to present unorthodox events while still spotlighting the best the poetry world had to offer, how to, as Knight vice-president of arts Dennis Scholl quipped, “take the orchestra out of the pit and into the streets.”

Not least, they wanted to ensure audiences would actually show up.

“We wanted the festival to be high-quality,” Cunningham says, “but also reach people who — even if they saw a poetry reading advertised — would never, ever go to it.”

“The problem with poetry is that it’s expected to be in a lecture hall or in a bar with an open mic,” Healy says. “There’s a fairly small group of people who are interested in coming to that, especially if it feels like it’s going to be work: ‘Uh-oh, we’ve got to take our medicine.’ The idea was to have poetry go find its audience, rather than have the audience come find it.”

Healy suggested O, Miami embrace multi-disciplinary events to “change the atmosphere,” whether via injecting poetry into a modern dance concert, working amidst an art installation, or simply serving an evening meal at an outdoor, waterfront restaurant. “Putting food and poetry together is brilliant — you’re got people comfortable and then you’re in a place where it’s a quintessentially Miami experience.”

Moreover, such fusions come with their own built-in audiences. “By bringing James Franco,” Cunningham says, referring to an O, Miami event with the Hollywood actor cum avant-garde poet, “we were able to trick people into listening to Tony Hoagland’s poetry. Which worked.” (Indeed, Hoagland captivated the audience and made a number of new fans that night.) Likewise, for a collaboration between poet Anne Carson and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Carson may be a critically-acclaimed figure, but “the Merce Cunningham name has a certain cachet that poetry doesn’t.”

Art Basel’s example also loomed large, particularly with its ability to present avant-garde art as simultaneously enlightening and accessible. On that note, Campbell McGrath stressed the importance of avoiding anything that smacked of the classroom or the Ivory Tower — poetry’s more familiar home. Similarly, Mitchell Kaplan believed O, Miami needed to feel less like an educational journey and more “like an event!”

“Everybody’s talking about the death of everything — the death of the book, the death of the literary scene,” Kaplan sighs. “But there are still people who want to interact with writers.” As proof he notes the record-size crowds for the Miami Book Fair, even as national pundits tell us that devoted readers are all supposedly cocooning at home with their Kindles.

The key would seem to be harnessing the power of a spectacle, utilizing Miami’s love of glitz to break through poetry’s “closed circuit.”

In that respect, O, Miami more than delivered. Over the course of its forty-three one-time-only events and twenty-six ongoing, month-long projects, there were poems in the sky, pulled by planes and dropped by a helicopter; poems surreptitiously sewn inside clothes in thrift stores; poems emblazoned on the wall inside the Design District’s much-loved Michael’s restaurant, as well as plastered on the side of nearly eight hundred buses; poems composed inside correctional facilities and outside schools; poems inserted amidst the flora and fauna of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden; and not least, poems featured at readings from Wynwood to South Beach.

It’s hard to quantify just exactly how many of Miami-Dade county’s residents encountered a poem over the course of the month. But if O, Miami missed a few verse-phobic folks, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

This report on the O, Miami poetry festival is part of Knight Foundation’s Reporter Analysis Series. It was written by Brett Sokol, the arts editor at Ocean Drive magazine. His writing on Miami’s cultural scene has also appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine and Slate. Judy J. Miller, who oversaw Pulitzer Prize winning coverage while serving as managing editor of The Miami Herald, edited the report. For more on Knight Foundation, visit knightfoundation.org, and for more on the festival, visit omiami.org.