Florida is not naturally associated with poetry, though Elizabeth Bishop wrote several poems about the state, and one of Wallace Stevens’ most famous poems is The Idea of Order at Key West. Key West was, appropriately, the town that Bishop and a number of other writers occasionally called home.
But poets are scattered all over the state: Campbell McGrath in Miami, Peter Meinke (the state’s current poet laureate) in St. Petersburg, David Kirby and Barbara Hamby in Tallahassee (in the same house) and now, according to last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Billy Collins in Winter Park.
