Everywhere A Prose

Walk around Miami-Dade County in April and you’ll encounter a poem. Whether at community gatherings, specific events or public places, you’re guaranteed to find countless narratives about Miami and its people out there, and it’s all thanks to the O, Miami Poetry Festival. The premise is to introduce people to this form of literature in a casual yet interactive and interesting way.

“O, Miami is about making poetry less seemingly elitist and more available to people who aren’t poets, who aren’t in academia, who might not even be readers,” says Jen Karetnick, freelance food-travel journalist, restaurant critic, poet and creative writer. “Everyone who has ever said, ‘I just don’t get poetry’ – O, Miami is for you.”

Karetnick, 55, says that people tend to categorize poetry as an art for the few when it’s really an art for the masses. “If you understand song lyrics, you understand poetry,” she says. “Poetry can be funny, clever, sly, sweet, serious, heartbreaking – and all those things at once, just like humans. It reminds us of who we are in all of our facets.”

Through poetry, Karetnick knows how to communicate best, especially when it comes to sharing her deepest emotions. In fact, she talks about poetry as her first love, finding it challenging and relaxing at the same time, a reason why she encourages people to immerse themselves into sonnets and sestinas – or to at least try.

“Reading poetry may allow for insight into an issue that you didn’t have before or give you a bridge to an experience. It holds a place for you and provides and outlet, giving you space to park your emotions. It’s a way to identify, to see and be seen, to acknowledge that this person gets how I’m feeling, and if they’re saying it out loud, then I must be okay,” she says.

The festival wants Miamians to encounter poetry in common areas, sparking interest in people who might want to enroll in poetry workshops and dive deeper into this literature form, “whether it's by seeing it from an airplane because it's been spraypainted on a rooftop or it's been printed on a faux "traffic ticket" or dispensed through a gumball machine,” says Karetnick. During the festival, Karetnick is hosting Cerveceria Poesia, a poetry workshop. She explains:

“Cerveceria Poesia is a workshop that SWWIM (www.swwim.org), the nonprofit I co-founded with Catherine Esposito Prescott, is giving. It's a radical revision exercise where we're taking poems written by Cuban women and turning them into our own poems through four different steps. Along the way, we'll be drinking four different beers at La Cerveceria Tropical and exploring the botanical garden. We chose that venue because the brewery is also like a Cuban revision. It began in Cuba, then went to Tampa, and is now reborn in Miami,” she says.

Karetnick stresses that participants don’t need to be professional writers to take the workshop. “It's designed so that you get something out of it, whether it's a sense of how deep our cultural history is, a place to admire the beauty of the tropics, a new friend, or even just a favorite beer. And who knows, you might just come out of them with a piece of work that really resonates.”

O, Miami, also works to build up the literacy community in the city, something Karetnick says Miami lacked before Scott Cunningham, a poet and essayist from Boca Raton, founded the festival in 2011. “For the literary community, O, Miami gives us a great sense of purpose – to pull together and create programs for the public, no matter our ages, when we arrived here, or what our educational background is,” says Karetnick.

Karetnick, who’s been living in the Miami area for 31 years, says she enjoys the way the city is constantly changing, moving and growing. “It’s a dynamic, multicultural, thriving metropolis that also is completely based in nature,” she says. “That’s the best of both worlds.”

And for the artists who have come from all over the world and now call Miami home, “‘O,’ is the poetic address of the beloved. ‘Miami’ is our beloved. Everything we do programmatically is meant to address our home, Miami,” states the festival’s website.