O, Miami, the multi-gestalt poetic affair that’s consuming this city with more than 30 events, 23 projects and 50 poets, is the poetry big time, perfect for a city that believes in living large. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the festival ranges from Anne Carson’s collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company last week to a boffo four-day finish at the New World Center: the upcoming culture wallow entails the high end of hip-hop, with Yale University Press’ The Anthology of Rap, and, this being Miami, celebrity, as movie star/poet/it boy James Franco appears with Tony Hoagland and Campbell McGrath.

The local art world has jumped into the poetry fray, starting with the aptly-named WORD, an exhibition with more than 50 works from the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ collection, drawing from the realm of poetry, word-related art and everything else. (On Wednesday, {+t}{+h}, MOCA, in conjunction with O, Miami, presents an evening with the “Argentinian avant-garde,” incorporating a conversation between poet Stuart Krimko and Cecilia Pavon, cofounder of the art-and-poetry project Belleza y Felicidad), an art gallery that has evolved into a publishing house for edgy Argentinian poets.

Caption: "La fin du monde, filmee par l'ange N.-D." (The End of the World, Filmed by the Angel N.-D.), a book by Blaise Cendrars, 1919. Illustrated by Fernand Leger.

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