By Tom Tracy
Miles Coon is aware that some people’s attitude toward poetry is less than welcoming.
Perhaps they have indelible memories of having to recite a bit of rhyme in front of their eighth-grade class, something about “gate” and “fate” that they could never quite memorize. Maybe they were confused and baffled by a first encounter with Walt Whitman, singing endlessly about himself and electric bodies.
Coon knows all this, but he wants you to check out the Palm Beach Poetry Festival regardless.
“I have said to people if you really, really hate poetry, the festival will come in a close second to having a root canal,” Coon said. “However, I dare you to attend readings at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival – particularly Billy Collins ― and still feel the same way about poetry.”
Situated once again at the Delray Beach Center for the Arts at Old School Square, in the heart of downtown Delray Beach, the ninth edition of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, set for Jan. 21-26, is expected to draw 2,000 to 3,000 audience members to its evening readings and other events, while some 120 writer-attendees, auditors and volunteers from 29 U.S. states and Canada will participate in eight small workshops and afternoon craft-of-writing courses with the wordsmith faculty.
Featured poets appearing at the festival this month come from a diversity of ethnic and regional backgrounds and include B.H. Fairchild, Terrance Hayes, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, Laura Kasischke, Thomas Lux, Tracy K. Smith, and Lisa Russ Spaar.
Also on hand will be performance poets Marty McConnell and “Rives” ― both to be featured at a coffeehouse performance event and DJ dance party on Jan. 26.
Collins is this year’s special guest, and in addition to being the poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, he is arguably the best-known living American poet.
A longtime professor at the City University of New York, Collins’ wry, carefully observed poems, gathered in collections such as The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), The Art of Drowning (1995), Picnic, Lightning (1998), Nine Horses (2002) and Ballistics (2008), are written in a direct, memorable style that audiences on television and radio programs like Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion clearly find engaging.
“Billy writes with the reader sitting on his shoulder; he is very concerned that whatever he is doing in his poem can be easily understood by the reader and yet what he does is rather remarkable,” Coon added. “He is one of the most charming and wittiest people on the planet and people who don’t generally read poetry may have two or three of his books in their collections.”
With an annual budget of $300,000, the festival has become one of the standout events for poetry lovers, and future lovers of poetry. It is also a highlight of arts season in Delray Beach, said Coon, president, chairman and festival director. A onetime manufacturing business CEO, he turned to poetry in middle age, receiving a master’s in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002.
He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, class of 1962 and the University of Virginia, class of 1959, where he studied philosophy and economics. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies.
Coon is a true believer in the power of poetry. It’s not supposed to remain a riddle, or a foreign-sounding text with hidden meanings and something to be avoided by the average person, he said. Once understood, it should be as widely appealing as its cousin, music.
“Poetry is about the most human feelings we have. When you go to a funeral or a wedding, you always encounter a poem, and why is that?” he asked.
“We are all here accidentally, subject to chance and random acts that endanger us every moment we are here, and so faced with disorder and existential uncertainty, poetry helps us order our lives,” Coon said during a conversation at his home in Ibis Island where he lives with wife Mimi, a contemporary artist.
He and his poetry advisory board pride themselves on staying in touch with the contemporary poetry scene in the English-speaking world and then selecting poetry writer-presenters of outstanding quality and who can teach aspiring writers.
Thomas Lux, who runs the poetry program at Georgia Tech and is a former Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, is one of them. In a press release sent out by the festival earlier this season, Lux had this to say about the festival:
“I’ve had the privilege of being on the faculty of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival for several years. Dozens of other poets have also taught at the festival. It’s easy enough to look up the accomplishments and experience of the faculty. This year includes recent winners of a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize,” Lux wrote.
“But I want to emphasize two things about the festival: its diversity ― all kinds of poetry and poetics, and room for all kinds ― and its rigor. The amount of class time (and individual time) given each student easily equals two-thirds of a semester in a typical MFA program,” he added. “It is a teaching festival. I’m proud of that.”
The festival also fosters year-round community events that bring poetry into the community, into nursing homes, and to special events like the “Bards of a Feather” poetry event at a local nature preserve, along with an annual lecture about an ancient form of Japanese short poetry held at the Morikami Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach.
But it is the annual festival and workshop series in January that forms the centerpiece for Coon.
“There is something special that happens at the festival that people love,” he said, adding that at the craft talks the poets talk about what goes into making a poem. Even the word poem, he said, derives from a Greek phrase that means “to make.”
“In the craft talks you can really gain an appreciation of what the artist is doing and why they do it that way, so that the next time you read a poem after hearing these talks you have an appreciation of the nuts and bolts of how a poem is made,” Coon said. “The poem is like a sound machine that is made on the page or in the ear, and these folks
tell you what goes into it.”
The festival’s events with Collins ― who was Coons’ first workshop teacher when he went back to school in his 60s ― promise to be all-time festival highlights. On Jan. 22, Collins will be interviewed by poet Ginger Murchison, editor of The Cortland Review and co-founder with Lux of the Georgia Tech poetry program.
Collins will also read select works Jan. 23 during a two-hour segment.
“The readings are akin to Beethoven coming and playing his own piano concerto,” Coon said. “This is a way to hear and experience the poems that are written by the featured poet, and these experiences are wonderful.”
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival runs from Jan. 21-26. Individual event ticket prices are $15 general admission, $12 for seniors, $10 for students. For more information, call 561-868-2063 or visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.
Video and audio: At this video/audio collection prepared for ArtsPaper, Miles Coon reads poems by Billy Collins, Thomas Lux, Jane Hirshfield and Laura Kasischke on video, and on audio, talks about this year’s festival presenters, discusses the festival’s outreach programs and Delray Beach, and explains why poetry is such a vital art form.