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Donald Justice

When the Miami Knight Arts Challenge finalists were announced last week, it was far from surprising to see cultural vanguard and O, Miami, poetry fest organization University of Wynwood on the list.

The U's plan, should it be gifted one of the $20,000 grants, is to produce a conference devoted to the awareness and appreciation of Donald Justice, the late Miami-born poet who's less-than-famous in his own city of origin. We spoke to University of Wynwood founder and director P. Scott Cunningham about the hometown hero and their potential plans to honor his good words.

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- O, Miami Food Poems: #thatssomiami
- Poetry Is Dead Parade: O, Miami Invites Dead Poets to Walk the Earth

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Gail Ghezzi

Before he was an editor at the New Yorker, before his three published novels and five collections of short stories, and before he'd contributed to publications like McSweeney's, the Paris Review, and the New York Times, Ben Greenman was just your average kid growing up in the Miami suburbs.

"I grew up in Kendall. It was fairly boring," Greenman recalls. "You'd come home, play basketball in the driveway, read.... You didn't really interact with your neighbors."

That suburban sense of isolation, of who are these people who live beside me, anyway?, helps drive the plot of The Slippage, the novel Greenman will be promoting at Books & Books this Thursday. It's just the most recent example of Miami's influence on his writing career, which began in the '90s at the newly launched Miami New Times.

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The Comics Factory

Our own Miami superhero sez: "Go get yourself some free swag!"

This first weekend in May marks one of the nerdiest of all time. In addition to Iron Man 3's opening day, you also have Saturday, May 4, which is Star Wars Day -- (May the fourth be with you) and Free Comic Book Day!

If you don't love free stuff, you're probably a supervillain. Here's where to fight the forces of evil in Miami -- and the best titles to pick up while the price is juuuust right.

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- Miami Builds a Better Superhero
- Star Wars Cantina Cosplay: May The Force Be With You at Spazio Nightclub

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If you were taking a casual stroll down Ocean Drive yesterday afternoon, you may have noticed something peculiar. Beyond the everyday array of half naked weirdos, sand-caked and sunburned tourists, and steadily inching traffic that usually molds the atmosphere of South Beach's most popular strip, there was a less common peppering of sounds echoing from Lummus Park's concrete boardwalk - a bullhorn, chanting in electrified, tinny tones; cries of "VIVA!" carrying through the air; pots and wooden spoons banging and clanging to no sensible rhythm and deep Caribbean drum beats churning from bongos slung across sweaty chests.

Is this Hialeah?, you may have asked yourself. Has Calle Ocho somehow slid into the streets of Miami Beach via osmotic pressure?

No. This was the march of O, Miami Poetry Festival's Poetry is Dead Parade.

See also:
- Poetry Is Dead Parade: O, Miami Invites Dead Poets to Walk the Earth
- Richard Blanco, Thurston Moore, and O, Miami Prove Miami Is a Family (Or at Least a Gang)

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Photos by Hannah Sentenac

Getting inked at O, Miami.

O Miami is all about breaking new literary ground. That's the defining principle of the festival, which aims to reach every citizen of Miami-Dade County with a piece of poetry. And throughout April, they've certainly blanketed our fair city with all things poetic.

Friday's Animal Spirits was one such groundbreaking event, a nighttime shindig where Miamians scored 305-inspired ink, sipped craft cocktails, and witnessed the first ever tattooing session-slash-poetry reading. New ground, for sure.

See also:
- Animal Spirits: Get Tattooed in the Name of Poetry
- Richard Blanco, Thurston Moore, and O, Miami Prove Miami is a Family (Or At Least a Gang)

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tattooroadtrip.com

Duke Riley.

Tattoos sting. So what better way to offset the pain than a serenade of spoken word and craft cocktails? That's the premise behind Friday's Animal Spirits event, where you can hear some epic poetry, sip some Hemingway punch, and possibly score a free tat, too.

Friday evening, poet Tom Healy and legendary tattoo artist Duke Riley (collaborators on new tome Animal Spirits) and poet and editor Kevin Young will all make appearances at the Freehand Miami as part of the O, Miami poetry festival's line up.

For adventurous attendees, there are 14 spots available for a permanent reminder of their love for the literary. Two artists will be inking on site at a pop-up parlor. While the tattoo is free, spots can be reserved online for $10. Then, you'll get to choose from a series of design options, all in the literary/Miami/animal spirits genre, in keeping with the event's theme.

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Quickly! Duck into the nearest doorway and let the stampeding hordes of poetry fiends spill palely past. If they spot you, start acting like a sport or religion and they will slowly back away, clutching their public radio tote bags to their chests and muttering, "Where is the mofongo of yesteryear?"

Phew. National Poetry Month and the second biennial O, Miami poetry festival are nearly over. Soon we will trade truth and beauty for humidity and mosquitos. But before then, several more of our nation's finest writers will attempt to undo the damage done to South Florida poetics by the Pinochet-like reign of the Denny's Moons Over My Hammy sandwich.

Among the most notable is Megan Amram, writer for Parks and Recreation and the Academy Awards telecast. Amram tells Cultist, "I love poetry more than almost anything," and is spending her show's summer hiatus living the life of itinerant cafe poet. "My idea of a vacation," she says, "is to go to cafes and write, namely poetry." For O, Miami, Amram will be reading alongside fellow poet Richard Blanco (you know, from the presidential inauguration) and sonic youth Thurston Moore (you know, from being awesome) at the New World Center on April 28. She's also planning "a bikini contest that involves poetry."

See also:
- O, Miami Poetry Festival Returns: Ten Most Exciting Events, Including Thurston Moore, Borscht Films, and Parks and Recreation

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Photos by B. Caplan.

Say what you will about the drunken creeps lurking in the alleyway shadows of South Beach, but they are pretty well-read. Or at least they were this week when the O, Miami poetry festival hosted a poetry-themed edition of Bas Fisher Invitational's Weird Miami Bus Tour.

On Wednesday night, Nathaniel Sandler, founder of the Bookleggers mobile book exchange, led a couple dozen ambulatory readers on a safari of the beach's alleyways, showing off hidden passageways and levers that could cut off power to a city block with just one tug. He paired each stop with a poem that evoked some spirit of the place, a daring challenge given that there are only so many poems about sticky puddles or severed thumbs.

See also:
- O, Miami's Pin Up Pop Up Poetry Exhibit Melds Graffiti and Verse
- Poetry Is Dead Parade: O, Miami Invites Dead Poets to Walk the Earth
- O, Miami Poetry Festival Returns: Ten Most Exciting Events, Including Thurston Moore, Borscht Films, and Parks and Recreation

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Poetry is cool shit. It's closely connected to images of a sensitive manly man or a powerful lady heroine, and everybody wants to feel like a hero at some point in the day. And it's at that time of day that O, Miami's ongoing Pin Up Pop Up Poetry event should interest you, because this event is all about making poets out of the whole community.

Located at ArtCenter South Florida, the Pin Up Pop Up Poetry event calls on any passerby, from the resident artist to the residential landscaper, to write a poem of any length, be it ten stanzas or two lines, and pin it to the walls of the gallery. It's a rarified happening that calls out the artist in every casual passing Miamian, a notion that's been widely well-received.

"At first," began Beatricia Sagar, artist and central organizer of the Pin Up event, "I thought maybe we could have a week or so, but they [the ArtCenter] were so nice they said we could do it the whole month and at the now we have over 350 poems on the walls."

See also:
- Poetry Is Dead Parade: O, Miami Invites Dead Poets to Walk the Earth
- O, Miami Poetry Festival Returns: Ten Most Exciting Events, Including Thurston Moore, Borscht Films, and Parks and Recreation

More »

After Miami's own Richard Blanco took the podium at Obama's inauguration earlier this year, our pretty city definitely scored itself a little more cred when it comes to the written word.

Lucky for those of us who are into literature, after a one-year absence, the O, Miami Poetry Festival is coming back to the Magic City. And yes, there will be Blanco. Thurston Moore, poetry flash mobs, dead poets, contests, and tattoos, too. It's kind of like a poetry-palooza.

"The point of the festival is really to reach people who normally wouldn't care or normally think they wouldn't care. In my experience there are a lot more people out there that have some connection to poetry than they're willing to admit," says P. Scott Cunningham, one of the festival's founders and the man behind the University of Wynwood.

See also:
- Richard Blanco on Beyoncé, Gloria Estefan, and Life After the Inauguration
- Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco Will Read at O, Miami With Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore

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