Miles Coon, poet, and running an annual
poetry festival after running a business

Miles Coon recited the words solemnly and leaned forward in his chair. “The word ‘scuttling’ changes the accent, reverses the meter. Why would he choose that word? Because he’s trying to convey total isolation.”

More than most 70-year-olds who ran a business for most of their adult years, Miles is in a position to analyze what T. S .Eliot meant in those lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the title poem of Eliot’s first volume of poetry. That’s because Miles took up poetry in a serious way in the 1990’s, after he found himself “sitting in an office with nothing to do.” A British company had acquired his plastics manufacturing business and then denied him meaningful management responsibilities, although it was required under the terms of the acquisition to keep him on.

The snub bothered him, but in the end it didn’t matter. The company that had acquired his business bought out his contract, and Miles turned to greater loves. Creative writing had always interested him, so he enrolled in an on-line course on short-story writing and started attending a workshop. “As I wrote, my stories became shorter and shorter,” he said, “until I realized that they really wanted to be poems.” This led to a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing and poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York, in 2002.

Since then writing poetry has become only part of his post-retirement career, and not the main one. Miles directs the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Delray Beach, Florida, an annual meeting ground in January for leading American poets and poetry students from all over the country. With his wife Mimi and the support of friends, Miles founded the Festival in 2005.

At the Festival there are poetry readings and lectures open to the public and workshops for participants who have applied and been accepted the previous fall. Poets serving as “presenters” and faculty are chosen, Miles says, because, first, their poetry is critically acclaimed. Secondly, they are “good or great” readers of poems, their own and sometimes those of poets who have inspired them, to an audience–“they need to be performers as well as poets.” Lastly, they are great teachers of poetry. “They fill the workshops.” For the January 2008 Festival, 96 participants filled 8 workshops, out of almost 200 applicants.

Miles himself is a published poet. His poems have been published in Rattapallax, a journal of “international writing” that comes with a CD of poets reading their works; Lumina, the literary journal of the Sarah Lawrence College graduate program; and nycBigCityLit.com, an online literary magazine.

Miles where he spends much of his time–at his
PC, working on the Festival and writing poems

His poems have also been included in two anthologies, Key West: A Collection, edited by Brett Van Emst (White Fish Press, New York, New York, 2001) and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences, edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar (Four Way Books, New York, NY, 2005). A chapbook (a small collection of poems) called Homeland Security was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2006. He has also given poetry readings in New York at The Ear Inn and at the Cornelia Street Café, in Manhattan.

Miles has published many of his own poems in a volume titled Algebra of the Soft Boy, the title of a poem that was his thesis at the graduate poetry program he completed. The volume is dedicated to his wife, Mimi.

His poems suggest a fondness for distilling personal experience in short, evocative lines. For example, this from “Intersection”:

I learned yellow
was the color of cowardice
from my father
and bullies in the schoolyard:
You’re yellow, he and they
would say when my spindly arms
and soft heart were tested
growing into manhood. . . .

Or this, from “Condolence Call, New York, September 2001,” written after 9/11:

A dead-end suburban street
congested with stars,
stripes, grief. We stream in,
in the weeping dark. A close-up
of the fireman, his helmeted face
pasted to the door, leaps
in candlelight that floods
the porch. Not a moth in sight.
Not a cricket or a barking dog.
The collection box,
just inside, is casket-like: . . .

Miles reads at least two books of poetry every week, and there are some poems he reads almost every week. “I believe that poetry is redemptive,” he says. “We need it in these stressful times.”

This month Miles is busy continuing to work on the nuts and bolts of the 2009 Fifth Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, with a staff and a team of volunteer interns.

Leading lights of American poetry at the Festival, which will run from January 19 through January 24, will include Martin Espada, Kimiko Hahn, Laura Kasischke, Thomas Lux, Gregory Orr, Anne Marie Macari, Gerald Stern, Denise Duhamel, and Victoria Redel. Florida poets Kelle Groom and Michael Hettich will perform a special reading.

There is also a late-night “Coffee House” event after the final poetry reading on Saturday evening. At the 2009 Festival the Coffee House event will feature “performance poets” Taylor Mali and Lynne Procope.

Miles giving a TV interview after
the final reading in January 2008

Audiences of about 700 people at the Fourth Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival in January 2008 heard readings by Malina Mörling, Major Jackson, Kim Addonizio, Thomas Lux, Lola Haskins, Spencer Reece, Campbell McGrath, Claudia Emerson, Sharon Olds, and C.K. Williams—names that are likely to resonate with poetry aficionados.

Miles A. Coon was born in New York City, in Brooklyn, in 1938 and attended P.S. 92 and the Woodward School in Brooklyn, and Great Neck High School (Class of 1955), in Great Neck, Long Island. He majored in philosophy and economics at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was graduated with highest honors in 1959. Then he went to Harvard Law School.

After getting his law degree, in 1962, he worked for three years in New York as a trial attorney in the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and followed that with a stint with a law firm, Coon, Dubow, Kleinberg & Strum, Esqs., that he founded with colleagues from the SEC. “We had a good time but no money,” Miles said. So he joined the family business, and worked there for 30 years, from 1966 until 1996, heading the company after his father’s death in 1989.

The company made plastics products such as hangers and display fixtures for manufacturers to provide to retail stores that sold their products. It was called Red Wing Products, Inc., with an associated manufacturing arm, Commander Industries, Inc. The business had as many as 150 employees in the 1970’s, with headquarters in Plainview, Long Island and a factory in Brentwood, Long Island.

Miles said he enjoyed the business, especially the creative aspects of designing and producing display fixtures.

In the 1990’s the business began to change. Large retailers started insisting that manufacturers deliver their products already mounted for display, and some of Miles’ major customers turned to overseas companies to meet their new needs. The business had a good customer mix, however, so that it was very salable, and Miles sold it to an English firm on favorable terms. He himself was kept on as adviser, and had the title of chairman but no direct operational responsibilities.

New managers were sent in, and when Miles found himself sitting in an office with nothing to do, his writing urge took over. It led him eventually to study with many of the poets who are on the programs at the Festival.

The Coon association with Palm Beach began with Miles’ parents, who lived there after his father’s retirement. Miles has continued a family tradition of philanthropy, with an emphasis on poetry, and supports many organizations that serve writers of poetry.

The Festival idea emerged out of a collaboration Miles undertook in 2004 with a Florida man, John Palozzi, who ran a local organization called Poets of the Palm Beaches. With about 200 members the group catered to the poetry proclivities of Palm Beach County residents, many of them elderly, and used Lynn University in Boca Raton as its venue for annual workshops. The experience inspired Miles to envision a similar event with a national reach. He parted amicably with the local group the following year.

The first Festival was held in 2005 at Lynn University, with Thomas Lux, Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith and Billy Collins, a former United States poetry laureate, taking part. Subsequent festivals have been held in Delray Beach at the Old School Square Cultural Arts Center, a national historical site.

The Old School Square Cultural Arts Center,
site of the Festival, in downtown Delray Beach

The Festival is held in partnership with the Cultural Arts Center, and financial backers Miles has lined up include Morgan Stanley and the Windler-Fitzgerald Group of Morgan Stanley in Atlanta, Georgia. The Palm Beach Post is also a supporter and has supplied extensive coverage, and several Delray Beach hotels provide lodging to featured poets and workshop participants at special rates.

There is an awards ceremony during the Festival for winners of a poetry competition the Festival sponsors for students in Palm Beach County high schools. The Festival also sponsors several community outreach events in partnership with other local organizations.

Nowadays Miles and his wife, who have been married since 1963, live for most of the year in Palm Beach, having sold their long-time home in Kings Point, Long Island. They have a son and a daughter, who has a five-year-old daughter of her own, and plan to live in the summer months near their daughter and grandchild in Massachusetts.

“I was very lucky in finding an art form in my retirement years that I found totally fulfilling and challenging,” Miles said. “The way the Festival reached into every state of the Union is really quite remarkable. In times like these, poetry is necessary for survival. It makes you feel enthused about life. I love what happens at the Festival. It’s so exciting–there’s a feeling in the air that’s palpable. I love it. I’m retired but my days are full.”

For more information about the January 2009 Fifth Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, click on www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.

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