April, the month in which Miami dresses in poetry thanks to ‘O, Miami’

The city of Miami will once again be flooded with poetry starting this Monday and throughout the entire month of April after the start of ‘O, Miami’, an annual initiative that is based on the premise that “in the most poetic place in the world” everyone can be poets.

From today and for the next 30 days, the inhabitants of this city will be able to find rhymes and poems in unexpected places such as the beach, the neighborhood store, billboards or laundromats, one of the hallmarks of this festival that also includes more than 40 activities, including readings, workshops and presentations distributed throughout Miami-Dade County.

“The Festival celebrates Miami, which we believe is the most poetic place in the world”The organizers of the event told EFE in a statement.

This year’s edition, number 13, has Yucef Merhi, a Venezuelan artist based in this city in southern Florida (USA), as the recipient of the inaugural edition of the Technically Poetic commission, endowed with US$ 30,000 and is awarded to artists who work at the intersection between poetry and technology.

Merhi will present the interactive project ‘Wish-a-Poem’, in which visitors to three public libraries will jointly create a poem by rubbing “a magic lamp”, which are connected to screens that display text and transmit and receive real time data.

“By rubbing a lamp, a verse will appear on one of the screens and on the same screen in the other locations, allowing three people in three different locations to interact and co-create the poems,” explains the organization.

‘Oh, Miami’ highlights the relevance of this commission at a time when the implications of Artificial Intelligence on language and the intellectual property of creative works are debated.

The festival is a love letter to Miami, a “city that continually rewrites itself”as its founder, P. Scott Cunningham, says, and in that sense it is not surprising that ‘O, Miami’ is behind the book ‘Ventanitas: A window to the coffee culture of Miami, by Daniela Pérez Mirón and with photographs by Gesi Schilling.

A book that will be the subject of a conversation on April 9 and investigates “what it means to call Miami home”from the ubiquitous cafe windows of this city, those “microcosms” that function for conversation, especially political ones.

Also as part of this festival’s programming, on April 23 the Miami Beach Botanical Garden will host a performance by poets and drag queens, who will offer “an immersive performance that weaves narratives of healing, refuge and transformation.”

The action echoes the attempt by the state government to restrict live shows starring ‘drag queens’.

The festival will have its formal launch this Friday with ‘In Miami, I’m Happier’, as the reading of texts and works made by the schoolchildren participating in the activities that ‘O, Miami’ carries out throughout the year has been called. anus.

A few days later, a group of elementary students will read the ‘Elegy for Tokitae’, a collaborative poem made in honor of the orca Lolita (also called Tokitae), who lived for decades at the Miami Aquarium and recently passed away.

The organization is still open for entries for Zip Odes, a ZIP code poetry contest that will post some of the winners on billboards in four counties.

‘O, Miami’ therefore brings together inhabitants from all areas of this city in activities that in many cases have been proposed and developed by them themselves. “Each year, our goal is for every person in Miami-Dade County to find a poem during our annual festival,” the organizers stressed to EFE.

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