It's Back To School For Gulfport Poet Laureate Peter Hargitai

GULFPORT, FL — Students in Pinellas County weren't the only ones returning to school this week.

Dianne Hargitai snapped a photo of her husband, Gulfport's first poet laureate Peter Hargitai, waiting to teach a class.

"I'm waiting in high anticipation for my first class," said Peter Hargitai. "It's like 'Waiting for Godot.' I'm sure it's the same with the student: teacher and student waiting to be astonished and/or to astonish."

A retired Florida International University in Miami professor, the Academy of American Poets award-winner still lectures as part of his mission as poet laureate to raise awareness of poetry in the community.

The Hungarian-born poet and his wife have called Gulfport home for the past three years.

Recent projects include the release of the documentary, "Daughter of the Revolution," based on the novel of a child witness to the tragic 1956 Hungarian Revolution written by Hargatai.

Sixty years after the revolution, Hargitai traveled back to Hungary with his adult son to recover his past. The visit evoked memories of the death and violence of the revolution.

Under the direction of Tünde Tálas, scenes from the author's book are woven into a narrative that brings the events in Hargitai’s childhood to life.

Hargitai wrote his first poem, "Rebels," when he was 9 years old. The poem is a tribute to the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After a daring escape from Hungary, Hargitai arrived in America with his father, a royal judge before the Soviet occupation, his mother and two brothers.

During his tenure at Florida International University, he published a collection of poems including a visionary text in 1994 in which he predicted the destruction of New York's Twin Towers: “And sparks will rain crystal, shooting off brilliant colors in helically twisted beams until the last pillar of the Twin Towers atomized into flakes and snowed onto the firmament.”

His poem, “Mother’s a Racist,” won the 2009 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Poetry Prize.

In addition to his own works, Hargitai won acclaim for his translations of the poems of the modern Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef.