O, Miami!

April is National Poetry Month, and I'm imagining tons of poets and poetry lovers coming together to celebrate all month long. What I'm having a hard time imagining is the spectacle that will be Miami this April due to the month-long celebration the city is hosting in honor of National Poetry Month: 'O, Miami.' This will not be a bunch of poets sitting around in a hotel-conference room or library, etc. going over their work--nope. The point of this event is to get every single person in Miami to read/look at/touch/absorb at least one poem before the month is out. There's 2.5 million people in the city. So naturally, poetry will be everywhere. The Miami Arts Charter building will be wrapped with a blank canvas of paper on Monday, April 25, and people are invited to come and write poetry on it, there will be poems on the Miami-Dade buses throughout the month, and during a poem-drop, poems will be dropped from a plane onto the city of Miami.

HFR found out about this when we got an email from the Betsy Hotel--one of the sponsors of O, Miami. The Betsy was first opened in 1942. The hotel asked us to send them two copies of HFR for display in their lobby for the O, Miami event, but the cool part is the Betsy Hotel is poem-friendly all year long, making sure each of its rooms has its own library and instead of (or maybe along with) the traditional pillow-mint, you get a poem on your pillow every night.

Miami is lucky to be able to have an event (and a hotel) like this, but wherever you are, I hope you have as good a time during National Poetry Month as I know they'll be having in Miami.