Last month, while we were visiting New York City, a proclamation was read in St. Petersburg Town Hall appointing me the city’s first poet laureate. Our quiet town has become “a city of writers,” the proclamation said, and oddly enough this no longer sounds humorous. Governments in general prefer their writers dead, so the times they are a-changing. Tampa has had a fine poet laureate, James Tokley, since 1996, and it’s time St. Pete caught up.
When Jeanne and I moved to St. Petersburg in 1966 — to start the Writing Workshop at Florida Presbyterian, now Eckerd, College — the only writer from here I was aware of was Jack Kerouac, drinking himself to a lonely death in a plain house on 10th Avenue North; and we’d drive by it once in a while as an act of homage. We had some friends in common with the old beatnik — notably the writer Richard Hill, now also gone — but never met. Back then, the city wasn’t very fond of him (and still isn’t, apparently).
Our NY revels, and past vacation disasters, after the break.
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2009.