By Siobhan Canty, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Knight Foundation

One of the great things about O Miami! is how it shows that poetry can be a daily and fundamental way of improving our lives.  When placed in everyday spots, poems remind us that there are other ways of seeing the world.  On the side of a bus, a poem can transform a traffic jam into a chaotic statement of human existence.  On a menu, a poem can transform a restaurant into a salon of ideas a la Paris 1920.  In the first two weeks of O Miami!, as more poems are put in our paths, we read them and drift off for a few moments into a parallel world, a new definition of our experience.

Today, the team at Knight Foundation is going from watching O Miami! to being O Miami!  Between now and the end of the month, the KF staff is adding poems to the auto-signatures on our e-mail.  It’s a tribute to the power of poems and to O Miami! And it’s a doorway to new ways of engaging the world for a few moments each day.

Join us and go O! by adding a poem to your e-mail signature.  If you need some help finding a poem, you can go to the Poetry Foundation website or to O, Miami’s participants list to then search on-line for examples of their work.