Post by kevinfelixlee on Apr 1, 2011 22:37:51 GMT -5
Today's the first day of National Poetry Month. But how to get people involved? A similar question worried even first-century Roman poets, who faced small crowds at their readings. Wealthy poets hired actors to deliver their lines and professional applauders buy rs gold to erupt into praise at key moments. Popular manuals offered less privileged poets tips how to avoid boring an audience: Quintilian advised against degenerating into a sing-song delivery (sorry, Yeats). But no one ever proposed a poetry chariot.
O, Rome, if only you could have foreseen the projects of O, Miami, a festival that begins today. It aims to expose all 2.5 million Miami-Dade County residents to poetry with the help of airplanes, a Ferrari, and seven hundred and fifty public buy rs money buses, no "how-to" manuals, professional applauders, or hired actors necessary (the actor and poetry geek James Franco will deliver his own poems at the festival).
"I think when people think 'poetry reading' they have a distinct vision in their heads of overeducated, unemployed, shaggy-haired people snapping their fingers," the poet Dave Landsberger said.
Landsberger wants to debunk that image with what he calls the Poetry Ferrari project, currently seeking funds on Kickstarter. He plans to drive a Ferrari 360 Spyder convertible around Miami-Dade County's roadways on April 27th, reading poems buy rs accounts at unorthodox stops along the way (such as in the Wal-Mart parking lot on 163rd Street in North Miami Beach). He's taking the respectable ancient Roman's lead by reading the works of dead poets, such as Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Wright, in addition to his own. "Most poetry readings are attended by other poets," he said. "It's a little insular, which makes for a strong community, but one with a very low ceiling. This is not a problem for a lot of poets and that's fine. The odd thing is that pretty much everyone you see over the course of the day has written a poem at some point in their lives."
Soon after hearing about Poetry Ferrari, the performance artist Jonathan Lizcano contacted the O, Miami committee with a proposal for a poetry-aerial project, similar to the one by the Chilean art collective Casagrande (you might have heard about Casagrande rs power leveling last August when its members dropped 100,000 poetry bookmarks from a helicopter over Berlin as a protest against war). Lizcano is in the process of attaching hundreds of poems, printed on recycled card stock, to tiny parachutes, which he'll drop over Miami from a seaplane. "If I can get even one person," he said, "to think about how lucky they are that in America the only bombs you have to worry about are poetry bombs, then I feel it's worth it." His project differs from Casagrande's by directly involving art education in America. Lizcano visited public elementary schools around Boston, some without art programs, and asked students to write poems. Lizcano collected poems by college students studying art and poetry as well as members of poetry collectives, and anyone else who heard about the project. Their poems rs power leveling will fall from the sky April 10th.
But Lizcano's plane is not the only poetry plane at O, Miami. Starting the second week of April, airplanes will fly up and down Miami Beach with banners displaying short poem excerpts by poets such as Octavio Paz, Spencer Reece (whose first published poem appeared in this magazine), and Joshua Beckman.
Finally, all seven hundred and fifty Miami-Dade County buses will carry poetry, courtesy of O, Miami and the Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion program. Charles Simic's poem "In the Library" will appear in English, Spanish, and Creole on signs designed by the artist David Reinfurt.
O, Miami also offers non-vehicular poetry: poems sewn into clothing tags, printed on restaurant menus, and hanging in the Everglades, a Literary Death Match hosted by one of our own editors, Ben Greenman, and a reading by the poet Anne Carson accompanied by dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
As poet Frederick Seidel wrote in his poem "Men and Woman" (he mentions that other Franco): "The car was the caca color a certain / Very grand envoy of Franco favored for daytime wear— / But one shouldn't mock the innocent machinery / Of life, nor the machines we treasure."
O, Rome, if only you could have foreseen the projects of O, Miami, a festival that begins today. It aims to expose all 2.5 million Miami-Dade County residents to poetry with the help of airplanes, a Ferrari, and seven hundred and fifty public buy rs money buses, no "how-to" manuals, professional applauders, or hired actors necessary (the actor and poetry geek James Franco will deliver his own poems at the festival).
"I think when people think 'poetry reading' they have a distinct vision in their heads of overeducated, unemployed, shaggy-haired people snapping their fingers," the poet Dave Landsberger said.
Landsberger wants to debunk that image with what he calls the Poetry Ferrari project, currently seeking funds on Kickstarter. He plans to drive a Ferrari 360 Spyder convertible around Miami-Dade County's roadways on April 27th, reading poems buy rs accounts at unorthodox stops along the way (such as in the Wal-Mart parking lot on 163rd Street in North Miami Beach). He's taking the respectable ancient Roman's lead by reading the works of dead poets, such as Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Wright, in addition to his own. "Most poetry readings are attended by other poets," he said. "It's a little insular, which makes for a strong community, but one with a very low ceiling. This is not a problem for a lot of poets and that's fine. The odd thing is that pretty much everyone you see over the course of the day has written a poem at some point in their lives."
Soon after hearing about Poetry Ferrari, the performance artist Jonathan Lizcano contacted the O, Miami committee with a proposal for a poetry-aerial project, similar to the one by the Chilean art collective Casagrande (you might have heard about Casagrande rs power leveling last August when its members dropped 100,000 poetry bookmarks from a helicopter over Berlin as a protest against war). Lizcano is in the process of attaching hundreds of poems, printed on recycled card stock, to tiny parachutes, which he'll drop over Miami from a seaplane. "If I can get even one person," he said, "to think about how lucky they are that in America the only bombs you have to worry about are poetry bombs, then I feel it's worth it." His project differs from Casagrande's by directly involving art education in America. Lizcano visited public elementary schools around Boston, some without art programs, and asked students to write poems. Lizcano collected poems by college students studying art and poetry as well as members of poetry collectives, and anyone else who heard about the project. Their poems rs power leveling will fall from the sky April 10th.
But Lizcano's plane is not the only poetry plane at O, Miami. Starting the second week of April, airplanes will fly up and down Miami Beach with banners displaying short poem excerpts by poets such as Octavio Paz, Spencer Reece (whose first published poem appeared in this magazine), and Joshua Beckman.
Finally, all seven hundred and fifty Miami-Dade County buses will carry poetry, courtesy of O, Miami and the Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion program. Charles Simic's poem "In the Library" will appear in English, Spanish, and Creole on signs designed by the artist David Reinfurt.
O, Miami also offers non-vehicular poetry: poems sewn into clothing tags, printed on restaurant menus, and hanging in the Everglades, a Literary Death Match hosted by one of our own editors, Ben Greenman, and a reading by the poet Anne Carson accompanied by dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
As poet Frederick Seidel wrote in his poem "Men and Woman" (he mentions that other Franco): "The car was the caca color a certain / Very grand envoy of Franco favored for daytime wear— / But one shouldn't mock the innocent machinery / Of life, nor the machines we treasure."