Aesthetic Drift #20 by Rose Lopez

O, Miami’s Poetry in Pajamas

As parents, my husband and I are constantly looking for things we can do with our kids. So when I first look over the calendar of events for the O, Miami Poetry Festival, I know right away we’ll check out their Poetry in Pajamas event at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens on Friday, April 12th.

We arrive a little late (another symptom of parenting) and pass ponds and kids and parents in pajamas playing cornhole and giant Jenga in the grass. Toward the back of the garden is a large Banyan. A small stage strung with Edison bulbs and a hand-painted sign is set up underneath the tree. To the right of the stage, a band plays; the woman sings about the joy of mangoes. (Later, I will realize the band is Afrobeta, a local duo described by the Miami New Times as “a match in disco-house heaven.”)

People have blankets and chairs set up on the lawn in front of the stage. My three-year-old is immediately drawn to a bubble machine. We will return to the bubbles many times over the course of the evening.

Afrobeta takes a seat, and two young boys stand on stage to emcee. They recite poems. “You probably know this poem,”the younger boy says, and points to his brother. “Sam wrote it!”It is about a whale.

“Whose kids are these?”my husband wonders aloud. “They’re great.”

A woman standing nearby overhears. “They’re hers,”she says, pointing to another woman in a halo of bubbles.

The woman is Sara Kaplan, the creator of Poetry in Pajamas, now in its second year.“My boys used to write poems together in their bunks when they were younger,”she tells me. “They submitted them to O, Miami, and the event just kind of grew from there.”

At 7 o’clock, Kaplan’s boys, Sam, 10, and Simon, 7, open the mic to the kids in the crowd. Shel Silverstein is a popular source for the participants. Some kids read off their phones. One girl introduces her poem by saying, “I just wrote this ten minutes ago.”The poem is about the courage it takes to get onstage and read aloud.

The extra incentive to participate in the open mic is entrance into a raffle to win a Poetry in Pajamas backpack. I am sorry my three-year-old can’t yet read, nor has she memorized any poems, because she loves backpacks. But many of the kids who do get on stage are not much older than my daughter.

Near the lawn, there’s a patio with food and vendors. Some kids are selling friendship bracelets they braid themselves. A young woman is offering free manicures to children. There’s a cart selling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bowls of cereal. Another selling crepes. Different kinds of fruit-infused water are free. Wine and beer is up for sale to the adults.

Apart from poetry and bubbles, the kids in the garden are drawn to the natural environment. My three-year-old spends a good portion of the night begging quarters off my husband to stick in a machine for a handful of fish food. She tosses it into the ponds where there are huge koi and a turtle.

My nine-month-old crawls in the grass, tries to follow the bigger kids onto a large rock. By the end, she is coated in a fine dirt. She is not the only one.

Much of the time, the poetry functions as ambient noise. But I love how homegrown everything feels, like a lemonade stand. There’s a wonderful organized chaos to the evening that makes me nostalgic. It’s the kind of good, clean fun I remember as a kid. It’s the kind of good, clean fun I hope my kids will remember when they’re older, and then write poems about.

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The O, Miami Poetry Festival has poetry springing up all over Miami in April. Learn more here.

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Rose Lopez is working toward her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. She also contributes content for the Miami International Book Fair. Her first short story was published with Big Muddy earlier this year. She lives in Miami with her husband and two children.

Aesthetic Drift #19 by Rose Lopez

The Underdog Saga: An Afternoon of Poetry and Baseball

April 6, 2019

In October 2017, my husband and I moved with our daughter from Germany back to Miami. We’d been gone from the city nearly seven years. But I have been following O, Miami since at least 2011. Back then the organization went by University of Wnywood. That year was also the inaugural year of their month-long poetry festival, held every year in April. This is the first year I’ve ever been able to attend. (Last year I was hugely pregnant with our second child.)

I take the baby, Lily, with me down to Coral Gables to watch the rematch of the Young Viejos versus the Old Poets, a baseball game at the Coral Gables War Memorial Youth Center.

The Young Viejos are Miami’s oldest-running community baseball team. The team is made up entirely of men over 65. (The City of Coral Gables website, which lists the team under their “Adult 50+ Services,”does not specify that the team is men’s-only, but there are no women playing on their team that I can see.) The team ordinarily plays twice a week.

The Old Poets are O, Miami’s “ragtag”team, according to the organization’s managing director, Melody Santiago Cummings. “The last time we were on the field was last year,”she tells me. “And they slaughtered us,”she says of the Young Viejos.

The game is already underway when I arrive with Lily strapped to me in the baby carrier, and the Old Poets are at bat. There are three or four spectators in the stands beside the Young Viejos dugout, but the Old Poets stands are occupied only by sunlight. Lily and I have barely sat down when Cummings invites us into the dugout for shade.

I’ve just seen an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where the space station is being overrun by objects of the crew members’imaginations. One is a famous baseball player, Buck Bokai, who tells the space station’s commander, Benjamin Sisko, that no one has time for baseball anymore.

Even though I’ve chosen to sit among the Old Poets, I’m not cheering for a particular side. I’m there for love of poetry and baseball. I love rooting for the underdog, and I feel like literature and baseball fit that bill.

Each time a new batter comes to the plate, he or she reads or recites lines of poetry out to the field through a megaphone, which has “This Machine Kills Fascists”written along one side, a loving nod to Woody Guthrie. Sometimes the batters don’t have lines of their own to speak, so Cummings or another Old Poets player pulls pre-typed strips of poetry from a cardboard box near home plate to read for them. The lines are often about baseball or about Miami.

Both teams make some nice catches and hit some good balls. It’s clear, though, that the Young Viejos are more skilled than their Old Poet counterparts. I overhear one of the Old Poets saying to a teammate, “The important thing is it looked good,”after the teammate smacks a pitch into left field, only to be thrown out.

My favorites words spoken are from a Young Viejos player—Gonzalez, his shirt says—as he’s preparing to bat.“You can stay young forever,”he says. “Keep playing baseball.”After the game, I’ll see him ride away on his skateboard.

The Young Viejos beat the Old Poets again, 14 to 9. Afterwards, I introduce myself to P. Scott Cunningham, O, Miami’s founder and executive director, as well as captain of the Old Poets. I’ve emailed him before about volunteering for the organization, but we’ve never met in person. I mention that it’s my first time at an O, Miami event and he laughs. “This is not a typical event,”he says. “But it kind of is typical, because it’s not typical.”

I ask him about the relationship between baseball and poetry. “Playing baseball and reading poetry are both very contemplative,”he says.

I think this is true of writing as well as of watching baseball. They’re slow-moving processes.

As a kid, I played on a softball team. My coaches stuck me in right field because I wasn’t very good. I wasn’t very good because I’d get bored out there—not much happens in right field—and start daydreaming about diving to save a fly ball or hitting a home run over the fence. When a ball was finally hit my way, I’d be too distracted, and always ended up dropping the ball or watching it roll past my glove.

I think, too, of how I feel as a spectator. I hear the clean smack of a line drive ball fielded by a glove, or feel my belly swoop as a ball makes its arc to the outfield, and I still fantasize about hitting one over the fences. If I hadn’t had my daughter strapped to my chest, I might have asked for an at bat.

Each time I read something great, I feel the same way. Like picking up a pen and swinging at words until something connects. It’s why I’m there.

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The O, Miami Poetry Festival has poetry springing up all over Miami in April. Learn more here.

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Rose Lopez is working toward her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. She also contributes content for the Miami International Book Fair. Her first short story was published with Big Muddy earlier this year. She lives in Miami with her husband and two children.

 

 

Aesthetic Drift #18 by Freesia McKee

O, Miami!

When you move to a new city and tell strangers that you’re a poet, brace yourself for reactions like, “Do you actually make money?” and “I don’t really get poetry.” But when you tell strangers in Miami that you’re a poet, they tend to say, “Have you heard of O, Miami? Wait till April.”

O, Miami is a colossus of poetry in South Florida, famous for its unusual methods of getting verse into the hands of every Miamian during National Poetry Month. One of their many programs this year is “A Room of One’s Own: A Teeny Tiny Poetry Residency.”

A different poet took residence each day for a week in the Bridge Tender House, a windowed kiosk built in 1939 which stands in front of the Wolfsonian Museum on South Beach. Originally used as an office for bridge operators, the Tender House was moved to this stretch of sidewalk in the 1980s.

For our residencies, the museum staff outfitted the place like a 1940’s office with old photos, a vintage LIFE Magazine, wooden shelves, and all sorts of fun objects for poets to play with like fancy paper, sharp pencils, a Roget’s Thesaurus, and a typewriter. Poets were encouraged to write any kind of poems in any style. Ideally, we’d also interact with the steady stream of pedestrians.

Since my residency fell on Friday the 13^th, I’d decided to hand out GOOD OMENS. I enlisted the help of my girlfriend Jade to distribute the omens and play a little live music.

Here’s what threw a wrench into the works: struggling with a cold, I completely lost my voice on the 12^th. I would need to distribute the omens without speaking.

The Tender House was full of creative energy. In addition to the vintage setup, the windows were filled with the poems of previous residents. They each took a different approach, some writing on envelopes, some using the typewriter. I felt at home.

We got right to work. Not knowing how many Miamians would need an omen that day, I’d prepared some beforehand, which we painter-taped to the outside of the house. With the windows open, Jade started playing her saxophone and I sat in front of the typewriter to write fresh omens for the luck-hungry public.

The foot traffic in South Beach is perfect for a project like this. Someone walks by every four or five seconds. We ignored those who were engrossed in technology and focused on people who had the capacity to receive.

Someone who took an omen asked if he could write one about “Trumpski,” but we said that sounded more like a bad omen, not a good one. Another group, interested in the sax, told us they felt like they were in New Orleans. We handed them omens. They didn’t seem particularly interested, but graciously accepted them anyway.

We distributed omens to tourists, locals, security guards, runners, dog walkers, fellow poets, beach-goers, people carrying many bags, friends, museum staff, and several sets of parents and children.

We communicated through the universal language of poetry in many dialects: French, Spanish, English, and rough hand signals. Jade did most of the talking. After heavily medicating myself with copious amounts of slippery elm tea, I even got my voice back (a little).

One person said that Friday the 13^th was her late mother’s favorite day. She lifted her good omen to us as if to “cheers” and said, “This is for her.”

Another told us about his “death app,” which reminds you five times a day to contemplate death. He said, “When you’re mad or jealous of someone, think about where they’ll be in 300 years. They’ll be dust. You’ll be dust, too! None of it matters! It’s great!” He showed us the most recent reminder, a Philip Larkin quote. Jade and I dually noted that we want to look into getting this app for ourselves.

We handed out close to 100 good omens. Before we left, we taped several unclaimed omens to the windows. Should you find yourself walking in South Beach over the next few weeks, I invite you to take a look.

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a booth similar to Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help, 5 Cents” in Peanuts, except instead of therapy, I’d be giving the public “Information.” Who knew that all I had to do was become a poet?

I love the delicious possibility in public writing projects. Community poetics explodes the notion of creative writing as a solitary act. It’s always good for writers to meet our readers face-to-face, and projects like O, Miami’s afford us the opportunity to think outside the bookstore, bar, or art gallery. Poetry readers and writers are everywhere. Should we be so lucky to encounter each other on the sidewalk.

Thank you to all the poets of the week for filling the Tender House with creative energy. Special thanks to Heather Cook, the Wolfsonian, O, Miami, and to Jade. Your support of poetry is a good omen for all of us. To learn more about O, Miami, visit http://www.omiami.org/.

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Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, Huffington Post, and Sundress Press’s anthology Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity. Freesia lives in North Miami.