There’s a poetry workshop held monthly in Orlando far away from the usual academic environs, led not by local professors but by two well-regarded figures in Orlando’s underground music scene.
Poets Anonymous, the brainchild of Will Bess (Warm Frames, Über Crunch) and Rachel Kinbar (Fade Theory, The Dining Room), is an informal monthly meet-up and forum. It’s meant to foster interest in and appreciation for poetry outside of schools, seminars and reading events. Writers of all skill levels are welcome to bring works-in-progress to share with the group.
Both Bess and Kinbar have long incorporated poetry into their respective creative practices, whether it be performance or self-publishing zines.
They met at various ear-splitting local shows, generally centered around the Dining Room house venue that Kinbar ran with Jonas Van den Bossche for many years. They discovered mutual interests in poetry — Dylan Thomas comes up as a shared early point of reference — and the DIY instinct to demystify and democratize the creative process.
It was important for both — fittingly, in that they both come out of DIY and punk-adjacent undergrounds — for these workshops to be a non-hierarchical undertaking, no metaphorical (or otherwise) bar to admission.
“I think academia has ruined contemporary literature,” deadpans Bess. “Even with journals or publishers, it’s either totally commercial or it’s totally exclusive. There’s not really an in-between, where anybody could feel like they could write a poem. Or at least connect with one.”
The current home of the Poets Anonymous meet-ups is not a bar or a coffee shop (or a classroom) — it’s the Quaker Meeting House in Colonialtown. The setting is perfect, low-key and unprepossessing, and the history of activism in the Quaker movement in the United States adds that extra little bit of countercultural je ne sais quoi.
“I do a lot of mutual aid organizing, and the Quakers have become really great allies in that work,” says Kinbar. “People don’t know the history of social justice activism that the Quakers were involved in for a very long time. And they’re very open to art. I did position it as poetry being radical and disruptive. They were very open to it.”
After four sessions, Poets Anonymous has garnered a multigenerational group of around 20 folks for their monthly Monday early-evening meetings.
“There were people there at the first one, especially, who had been writing for, like, 20 years and then there was also someone who had never written a poem before in her life,” says Bess.
Asked about the structure of these workshops, Bess and Kinbar talk about keeping things loose and relatively unstructured to better channel the energy in the room that particular day.
“Usually at the beginning, I’ll pass out a poem to read that I think gives them some sort of perspective how this is something new you could try. And then after that, we may have them practice that same thing. Then share it if they feel like it. I always encourage them, but I don’t try to force them to read [aloud] or anything. Everybody’s really shy about that sort of thing,” says Bess.
“It’s very loose, but it’s always the intention to have a sort of structure underneath all of the spontaneity. Some of the feedback we’ve gotten is that people do want time for writing. They have a hard time doing that in their daily lives. So we’re definitely going to focus on that more,” says Kinbar. “And we did a collective poem; that was a spontaneous idea.”
Speaking to the two, it’s clear that this is much more than just another creative lark or side project. This is a deep-seated vocation.
“I think of poetry as a way of being. So it’s in everything, it cuts across all the different mediums that I use,” says Kinbar. “Many people think of poetry or a poem as this written thing, which it can be, but I don’t think of it as only that. It comes out of all the things that I do, and all the ways that I do things. It’s really a way of seeing the world and interacting with the world.”
Both have alternately touching and funny stories of when poetry became an important part of their lives — Bess remembers reading Percy Shelley as a youth and promptly penning a “complete rip-off”; Kinbar remembers dressing up like a beatnik in school for Halloween and no one knowing what she was. Each stresses the importance of early encouragement and praise from teachers of their writing and says they want to continue paying that encouragement forward.
“Even if they’re just being a teacher and they’re just trying to encourage you, I mean, it matters for someone that’s young. They hear that. So they can be motivated to keep going or at least have an inkling that another person cares about this thing that they just did,” says Bess. “Everybody needs a little bit of encouragement, no matter what.”
With this week’s meet-up, the fifth in the Poets Anonymous series, goals and expectations are modest, just following where the words take them.
“I just hope people keep coming. I just hope people keep writing. Honestly, I just want them to keep trying,” says Bess. “That’s the best thing about it, seeing them just blowing their own minds, getting that sense of, like, ‘Man, I really did that.’”
“We want it to be a collective endeavor,” adds Kinbar. “We’re creating the space, but it’s for everyone to create.”
POETS ANONYMOUS: 7 p.m. Monday, June 8, Quaker Meeting House, 316 E. Marks St., orlandoquakers.org, free
This article appears in June 3-9, 2026.