Thanks to all who entered our first ever FBR holiday writing contest.  We appreciate how many of you found time in this busy month to respond to our call for submissions.  Our staff read the entries blind and came up with a tie for first place, with two very different pieces which center on family, one full of the demands, stress, and humor of this time, another showing how memory freights the holidays with loss.  We have, as well, an honorable mention which looks at New Years past and present.
     The prize-winners are:
First place (tie): Karen Martin of Staunton, VA & Elaine Winer of Miami Beach
Honorable Mention: Joan Lipinsky Cochran of Boca Raton
     All three have an only-in-Florida sense of place.  All are printed at right.  When the presents are wrapped—and unwrapped—we hope you’ll read them and reflect on the special nature of the season in the Sunshine State.  We're wishing everyone a time of comfort and joy.
        —Lynne Barrett

    On Monday, it seems no one knew anything of Florida’s first Poet Laureate beyond a single sentence on the state’s arts website.  Even this bare mention contained an error (since speedily corrected), the wrong middle initial.  In just a few days on the trail, Antolin Carbonell has pulled together the sketch of his life posted below.
                    —Lynne Barrett

    Franklin N. Wood, the oldest of 7 children of Attorney Benjamin Franklin Wood and Hannah Maria Neill, a Canadian of Irish descent, was born in New York in 1877 and spent his childhood in Connecticut, North Carolina and Georgia.  After a stint as a New York reporter, he lived with his first wife, Marion, a music teacher, in Providence, Rhode Island, managing a commercial enterprise.
    By 1920 Wood was a successful Chicago attorney, married to Blanche Vedder, a 27 year old concert singer, and the father of a daughter, Priscilla, age 3. The Woods moved to a $50,000 residence in Daytona Beach during the 1920’s where Wood continued to practice law and started writing poetry.
Florida and Other Poems, published in 1925, features a frontispiece from an oil painting by J. Randolph Brown. The book contains 55 poems, most about Florida, its nature, and its scenic sunsets and moonrises.  His next book, Sunset Horns, published in 1927, was dedicated to His Excellency, John W. Martin, Governor of the State of Florida, and may have been the key to Wood being named the state’s first Poet Laureate.
    Sunset Horns contains 38 poems.  While not all are about Florida, one poem celebrates the newly finished Dixie Highway and another, “Christmas in Florida,” has images of “cocoanuts and royal palms… and scarlet-flowered poincianna trees.”  Wood took considerable poetic license by including a tree that only blooms in June in a Christmas setting. Fortunately for Florida, his successor learned about Poincianas from naturalist Charles Torrey Simpson before writing 54 poems on the subject.
    Wood died in Volusia County in the spring of 1931 at age 54. Governor Doyle Carlton named Vivian Yeiser Laramore the second Poet Laureate in October 1931.
                    —Antolin Garcia Carbonell

   In my blog Monday, I asked about the first Florida Poet Laureate.  Here is all that is said about him on the state’s Florida Arts webpage:  “The Poet Laureate serves without term and without compensation. The first Poet Laureate was Franklin L. Wood, appointed by Governor John W. Martin in 1929.”
    It turns out that even in this bare mention there is a mistake.  Our intrepid literary history detective Antolin Carbonell this week discovered that Franklin L. Wood was, in fact, Franklin N. Wood, a lawyer who lived in Daytona Beach and published two books of poetry in the 1920s.  We will have a sketch of what Carbonell has learned about him posted here within a day or two.
    It may seem a small thing, the middle initial of a forgotten poet, but in this world of Googling, you have to know your Franklin Ns from your Franklin Ls.  I’m dropping the State Arts people a line—and meanwhile, I’ve corrected Mr. Wood in my blog below.
    In the past few days we’ve had a tremendous response to our feature on Vivian Laramore Rader, from those who never heard of her and are fascinated and curious to some with additional information about her.  Groups wanting to know more about her and the diverse community of poets which she fostered have asked Antolin Carbonell to come and lecture, and he is making new discoveries daily.  And a woman who had nearly vanished is visible again.
                —Lynne Barrett

    Literary fame is fleeting, and even a Poet Laureate may disappear from view.  In our latest feature, Antolin Garcia Carbonell brings us a story of literary acclaim, disappearance, and re-emergence.  Intrigued by a house in Miami which he learned was once the home of a Poet Laureate of Florida, Carbonell searched out the facts of Vivian Laramore Rader’s life, from her early years in Sanford and education in Jacksonville to over 50 years as a woman of letters in Miami.  Over the course of many months, Carbonell’s research led him through newspaper interviews, census records, and city directories.  In the Miami Dade Public Library he found handwritten letters among the archives.  His fascinating piece traces the influences that informed her work and her decades as a vibrant presence in the literary artistic community in South Florida.  Carbonell’s research is ongoing, and he’d be happy to hear, via FBR, from anyone who has other information about Laramore Rader.
    Florida has had only three Poets Laureate.  Of the first, Franklin N. Wood, who was appointed by proclamation of the governor in 1927, it seems almost nothing is now known.  Laramore Rader is reemerging from the shadows here.  It must be noted that her lifetime appointment meant that in the last period of her laureateship she was out of fashion and in her final years incapacitated.  Antolin Carbonell tells me that at this time there were grumblings at the long duration of her term.  Then for five years after Laramore Rader’s death, the position sat vacant, until there was a call for applicants for the unpaid position. From among the more than 400 who applied, an anonymous panel of out-of-state advisors chose Edmund Skellings, who was appointed in 1980.
    Skellings’ interest in new forms of poetic presentation began early, with tape, and his goal of bringing poetry to wider audiences evolved with the technology available.  I first became aware that the state had a Poet Laureate when Skellings, then Director of the Florida Center for Electronic Communication at FAU, received a grant from IBM for computers to connect the creative writing programs at FSU, UCF and FIU. In the early 90s, two computers and the network connections to reach the other schools (not, then, a matter of course) showed up one day in a little room designated for this use under the terms of the grant (and to this day this is spot where our graduate students can get onto the internet, print their work, and sample literary magazines we shelves above the monitors).  At FAU, Skellings went on to bring into being a graduate program offering an MFA in Computer Arts.  He retired from FAU in 2006 but continues his work via his foundation.  His website includes a photo archive, recordings, and short animations of poems you can view.
    In recent decades, what a Poet Laureate is has evolved.  The US official title is U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.  The position carries a $35,000 annual stipend, with the Laureate appointed annually by the Librarian of Congress, who consults with former Laureates and poetry critics about the choice.
    The term is only a year (with the possibility of renewal or a later reappointment) and recently the position—a job as much as it is an honor—has gone to a great variety of poets, who have advocated for poetry in fresh ways according to their particular interests and ideas about how to reach audiences, such as ‘91-‘92 Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky’s project to provide poetry in hotel rooms and airports and 3 term Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project.  Billy Collins (who after serving in the national position is now Poet Laureate of the state of New York), initiated and continues Poetry 180, a poem a day program for high schools.
    And the Library of Congress has done a great deal to increase pubic awareness about the position, so that each time a new honoree is appointed, there is a bit of buzz, as television interviews introduce the nation to a poet of whom they have been unaware—so that for at least a few minutes poetry is news.
    This model—and perhaps the simple fact that with the burgeoning of MFA programs offering them employment, lots of publishing poets now live all over the U.S.—has led to changes, too, at the state level.  The picture overall is one of moving from a lengthy appointment which sits like a laurel upon the brow of the honoree who either produces the occasional poem for a state ceremony or has no prescribed duties, to a shorter term which moves the honor around, garners fresh publicity with each appointment, and asks more from the appointee. The Library of Congress website has information on current state appointees, past ones, different systems for choosing a Laureate, the evolution in terms and duties, and the occasional controversy.  A sampling:
    Louisiana now has a two-year term, but previously the term was concurrent with that of the appointing governor—making poetry very much a patronage position.  In 2003, Illinois went from lifetime appointment to a four-year renewable term.  North Carolina has gone from a lifetime position to five years to two years.  New Jersey (where I was born, a state that has turnpike rest stops named after poets Joyce Kilmer and Walt Whitman) created a Poet Laureate position in 1999, when Gerald Stern was appointed, but the second Laureate, Amiri Baraka, read a poem at the 2002 Dodge Poetry Festival with lines alluding to anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracy theories, which set off outrage.  Gov. James McGreevy called for Baraka to resign, and when Baraka resisted it was found that no means of removing a poet laureate had been written into the law. The NJ state senate abolished the position in July 2003.  (Not long thereafter Gov. McGreevy ran into some controversy himself and resigned.)
    One question that obviously comes up in the transition from lifetime appointments to shorter terms is how to handle this when impatient for change.  In Pennsylvania, the first and only poet laureate was Sam Hazo.  After he’d held the post for ten years, according to the Library of Congress’s site, “On May 1, 2003, Hazon was notified by an aide to Gov. Ed Rendell that his ‘services were no longer needed.’ Rendell's decision to remove Hazon from office effectively terminated the position of Pennsylvania poet laureate.”  Yes, the site calls Hazo, incorrectly, Hazon, piling on the disrespect.  In a more gracefully handled case, Nevada had a lifetime position, but when Norman Kaye had served for 30 years (1967-2007) the governor appointed him Poet Laureate Emeritus, which, while honoring Kaye, made a new appointment (no longer lifetime) possible.
    In Florida, there has been some subdivision of the job.  In the 1990s, Laurie O’Brien of Pensacola, a fine poet and a good friend of mine, was named Poet Laureate of the Panhandle (actually, of Northwest Florida, but Panhandle has a ring to it) for a term.  When she died in 2004, her obituary mentioned this fact, and, ever alert to a title, news services picked up the story.  In Miami, I saw her death announced on a streamer on a morning news show, something I am certain Laurie would have responded to with wry wit.   Just this month, Tallahassee’s Mary Jane Ryals (poet, fiction writer, editor, and, incidentally, a contributor of reviews to FBR) was appointed the first Poet Laureate of the Big Bend. Her two year term “comes with many expectations and no paycheck.”
      Perhaps there already has been or will be further Florida Balkanization.  We have so many poets in the state now, many of them with glowing reputations, it seems we should ask what they could do for Florida AND what Florida could do for them. Couldn’t the wonderful Peter Meinke at least be Poet Laureate of Tampa Bay?  Who would you pick for Bard of the Keys?  Or, on the other hand, do you believe there should be separation of poetry and state, and no official position at all?
    I am not a poet so, without fear that anyone will think I’m angling for a tiara of bay leaves, I’d like to get some conversation going on this subject.  Write to me at floridabookreview@gmail.com and I’ll gather here a sampling of your views.  And please let me know if you know anything about the elusive Franklin N. Wood.
                    —Lynne Barrett