Bad Poems Return: Poetry & Memory
Now in its second year and its first time hosted at Books & Books in Coral Gables—Bad Poems: Poetry of Resistance Defiance and Dissent returned in collaboration with Maven Leadership Collective and O, Miami Poetry Festival, reaffirming poetry as both historical witness and record.
This community gathering centers Langston Hughes’s “The Ballad of Sam Solomon,” a poem that chronicles Black Miami’s defiance against the Ku Klux Klan and the fight for voting rights in the city circa 1939.
“Sam Solomon said,
You may call out the Klan
But you must’ve forgot
That a Negro is a MAN.
It was down in Miami
A few years ago.
Negroes never voted but
Sam said, It’s time to go
To the polls election day
And make your choice known
Cause the vote is not restricted
To white folks alone.”
Hughes’ text serves as an anchor that poetry has always functioned as a people’s archive. From this position, the Harlem poet carried a message from Miami to the world: Black residents would not be terrorized out of their democratic rights
The Books & Books courtyard transformed into a revival. Church fans pushed back Miami’s heat, shouts of “amen” and “say that” punctuated the air, a sense of collective witnessing took hold as community members shared their own poems documenting struggle, tenderness, resistance, defiance, and ongoing fights for liberation.
Throughout the evening Miami’s own award-winning poet Arsimmer McCoy invited the audience of just over 200 people to continue writing their own “bad poems”—works that break rules, tell the truth plainly and stand firmly in the tradition of Black literary resistance. A bad poem cuts through pretense and speaks with its whole chest, unapologetic.
The evening closed with a powerful invocation from McCoy, who urged the room to “remember your training.” It was a call to lean on ancestral knowledge, collective memory, and the practiced habits of resistance that have sustained Black communities through generations.
Bad Poems reminds us that poetry remains one of our most durable tools for collective memory and collective struggle.
