Ater moving to Florida from Indiana, where I grew up, I had to laugh when Floridians insisted that the state had four seasons. Sorry, but any place where you can wear shorts and sandals year-round does not have real seasons. That’s why you see license plates declaring “Endless Summer.”
Winter Park physician Stan Sujka, a native Ohioan whose new book of poetry is called Love Story: Passion and Love Poems, seconded my emotion: “Four seasons of summer, baby!” Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, a native New Yorker who moved to Winter Park 17 years ago, preferred winter, and added some Collins-style nuances:
“In winter the weather is like paradise,” noted the author of Water, Water, the most recent of his 13 best-sellers. “God set the thermostat between 65 and 78. This could be the weather in the Garden of Eden.”
Continued Collins: “Summer is purgatory—an embracing wet heat that follows you into the shade. Fire and brimstone sermons threaten us with an eternity in hell, but they never mention humidity. If they had mentioned humidity in hell, I think I would have committed fewer sins.”
This is what happens when you ask poets about the weather—you get sucked into a colloquy about theology and climatology. How did this happen?
I noticed that April is National Poetry Month and figured, since I was writing about seasons, it would be fun to get input from poets while saluting their special month. Then I found out that April also is National Frog Month and National Grilled Cheese Month, among other celebrations of animate and inanimate things, so maybe the poetry holiday isn’t that special.
In any case, I asked several local versifiers if weather affects their work and if they agree with T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” that April is the cruelest month, since in Florida it’s decidedly not. In fact, weather-wise, it’s just about perfect
Sujka named January as the cruelest month, recalling the numbing winter “grayness” that shrouds the Buckeye State. Elaine Person, a speaker and poetry instructor whose work has been anthologized, agreed, even though her birthday month is January. She loves April “when blooms pop, and I can sit outdoors on my friend’s memorial bench in Leu Gardens and write.”
Collins is not a fan of February: “There’s a sports slump. The Super Bowl is over, baseball hasn’t started. It’s gloomy, it’s cold, the days are short.” But for Holly Mandelkern, whose most recent published work is called Beneath White Stars, the blistering heat gives the cruelty edge to August.
She adds: “We’re spared the month’s full wrath with air conditioning, though my granny always preferred the river’s breeze blowing through her screened-in porch since that darned air conditioning made her arthritis act up.”
A lovely image, making summer seem almost tolerable. Leave it to poets to find silver linings in our grinding reality. Person, founder of the Orlando area chapter of the Florida State Poets Association, offered wry humor.
In “Winter in Florida” she writes excitedly of donning a double-knit turtleneck pullover sweater, high-top leather boots, black leather jacket, red scarf and black suede gloves: “Stepping outside / I was so ready for winter / I love winter in Florida / When the temperature dips down to 65.”
“Fall,” from Susan Lilley—Orlando’s first poet laureate—is an evocative ode to three seasons. Perhaps fearing that her poetic license would be yanked, Lilley doesn’t jump the shark to include winter, conceding in one line, “I fanned myself with a useless L.L. Bean winter catalogue.”
She compensates by offering a slew of unofficial seasons that we all recognize: “Termite season, mosquito season football season, soccer season, tax season, Magic season, prom season, rainy season, campaign season, protest season, flying palmetto bug season, and alligator mating season.”
Does the weather outside their window influence these creators? I figured to some degree it must; that seemingly endless summers and endless winters are bound to inspire contrasting visions. For example, it would be surprising to learn that Edvard Munch was living on Siesta Key when he painted “The Scream” instead of his native Norway, where nearly half the country lies north of the Arctic Circle.
Mandelkern’s lifelong affinity for Florida landscapes, seascapes, flora and fauna resounds in her work. In “Soon They’ll be Sayin’” she writes: “‘Why are you moving to Florida?’”/ Some say for gators and Gator games, / fishing holes and Seminoles, flaming flamingos and roseate spoonbills, / morning mangoes and late-night tangos, oranges and limes sublime, / turf and surf.”
Noted Mandelkern: “I suppose I could have written similar poems from Buffalo, But here we have fewer layers covering our core and can get right down to some of our heated issues.”
Weather is a nonissue for Collins. He said that he wrote “Winter Trivia,” which first appeared in Winter Park Magazine (before it was published in Water, Water) in the balmy comfort of his home. He added that Mel Tormé penned “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your toes.”) during a heat wave in New York.
The question triggered a momentary identity crisis for Shawn Welcome, spoken-word artist and Orlando’s current poet laureate. “Good question,” he said. “They say a fish doesn’t know they’re wet. I’ve been in Florida for so long, I can’t truly say how much impact weather has had on me as an artist. I guess I’m a fish.”
Sujka, whose son Joseph and daughter Emily also write poetry, responded to the query about climate with a story about Emily, who now lives in France and has published a poetry collection called Beautiful Ends. Many of us who have grown accustomed to having four seasons of summer and wearing shorts and sandals year-round will relate.
“If I grew up in Florida, could I have a winter-weather poetic voice? Probably not,” said Sujka. “My daughter grew up in Florida and dreamed about snow. When she was 7 years old, we went to Long Island for a family celebration. It snowed and she wanted to make a snowman.”
The project was quickly scuttled when the dream of snow proved less enticing than the fact of it. After making a single snowball, her father recalled, Emily dropped it to the ground and marched back inside the hotel. Shortly thereafter she expressed herself with poetic brevity: “This stuff is cold!”
Greg Dawson is a journalist and author. He has worked as a reporter, a television critic, an opinion columnist and a consumer columnist. His most recent book, with Susan Hood, is Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis (HarperCollins, 2022). Dawson is a contributing writer for Winter Park Magazine.