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

Photo Credit To Agencia EFE

The city of Miami will once again be flooded with poetry starting this Monday and throughout the 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 a poet.”

During 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, among 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 contest organizers said 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 $30,000 and which 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,” the organization explains.

‘O, 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.