The Other Thing I Did Over the Weekend

Okay... the sports bump has occurred. Now, here's the much bigger news from my weekend. O, Miami, the poetry festival that I'm co-founding here in Miami, Florida, has officially been announced to the world. We announced our presence, ambition, and intentions to a large crowd that had gathered at Miami's Book Fair International, to hear Patti Smith read from her new memoir. Here's an article about the evening.

There's plenty of write-ups about the evening out there on the interweb, but I choose this one because the picture there of Patti happens to be caught right at the end of our introduction, which involved gathering 80-odd people to stand up and read Rimbaud's sonnet "Vowels." People stood up and joined in with Scott as he stood on stage as official introducer for Patti, entering in sub-masses with each of the vowels as they were mentioned in the poem. By the end, it was pretty loud and awesome. There should be video of the thing here on the "net" eventually, at which point I'll share it.

But Patti did shout us out before leading a sing along of her own hit song "Because the Night," so that was extra-specially-validating. Since Scott and I didn't really know, as we conceived of the poem-action, if it would really go over or not, but it definitely became part of an evening that was important for a lot of folks. Auspicious beginnings for O, Miami!