NOTES

Yesterday afternoon I was socially obliged to go down to London for the inauguration of the Poetry Archive at the British Library. I took advantage of the visit to call Ulli Freer, a poet friend who works at the library. We met, went for a drink, then returned to the building so I could meet a Chilean artist, Cristóbal Bianchi, who was bringing me a book, Lyrics, by Sergio Coddou. I know Sergio only from correspondence and had never met Cristóbal. We had a remarkably interesting hour. Cristóbal talked about his CasaGrande magazine project (the journal mutates to a different form each issue) and of his experiences bombing certain cities with poems. These events began when his group, on the anniversary of the bombing of the Presidential Palace by Pinochet/CIA which led to the Pinochet years, dropped hundreds of thousands of poems onto the building. The positive reaction of the people, at this reclaiming of place, led them on to similar projects over Guernica, and Dubrovnik; now they’re negociating with Coventry. Hearing “Dubrovnik” Ulli sparked. It turned out he’d been in the city that very day, had watched the poems float down, and still had one at home.
Eventually I had to leave them and go down to the event which seemed to consist of men in dark suits wearing labels and over-thin sharp-faced women speaking PR into cell-phones. I drank a few glasses of wine, spoke briefly to Richard and Andrew, the two pleasant people I’d dealt with, had my right cheek just missed by Elaine Feinstein’s lipstick, and left…. twenty minutes. Enough. Without the energy of Ulli and Cristóbal my sense of poetry would have been as glum and dull as usual. But I took out Sergio’s book on the train and through my rusty 35-years-unused Spanish it was fine. Saved by Latin America.