I’ve set up residence at Washington Square Arts to see if we can’t cinch the world up into a single verse, the uni, as we all know, the eel of possibility. I live poetry. In Belgium they forced me into the cocoon where I still rest. I need a globeful of spy poets. Investigate the Truth, and send me nourishment. “It” is all true....
Every two years since 1952, Arthur Haulot -- poet, creator of the Belgian tourist office, towering dome -- presided over La Biennale Internationale de la Poésie, currently headquartered in Liege, Belgium. It’s an extraordinary Francophonic affair, most formal and harkening back to another era, replete with full sit-down lunches and dinners for four days (red wine and white wine courses, unless it’s a beer kind of meal), and lots of schmooze. After an article about my poetic endeavors appeared in a French magazine in August 1996, M. Haulot tracked me down. On the closing day of the 1996 Biennale, I made the following remarks to the 300 poets present, from China, Chad, Russia, and 80 other countries.
Remarks by Bob Holman
at the XXth Biennial Congress of Poets
“Poetry and the Dream”
Liege, Belgium, September 15, 1996
(Sound of computer booting up....)
I’m going to be talking in English, if that’s OK with you [Arthur Haulot: “Sure sure sure...”] -- but I’m going to be talking in Poetry, so I’m sure you’ll have no problem understanding in any language. You know they say that if you tell your dream it won’t come true. But I’m going to tell you my dream and ask you not to worry about it, because my dream’s already come true:
Here I am.
A week ago I was in San Francisco, staying at a friend’s house. We listened to his answering machine. There was a call from the Belgian Tourist Office requesting that I call a M. Haulot: it was very important! It was about making a trip to an International Congress of Poets!
That is a dream. To hear that message on an answering machine is a dream. My friend insisted that I had made the call myself, just to impress him.
The idea of an actual Poetry Emergency still seems foreign to most people. It is not foreign to Arthur Haulot -- he has been creating Poetry Emergencies for forty years!
The idea is not foreign to me. I heard in Arthur’s voice the same focused energy, in itself a poetic dynamic, that I use when I tell poets in the U.S. that they have to participate in an event that will be great for them, super for poetry and change the world itself -- the world that contains poetry, and is contained by poetry.
In other words, et parce que je suis un poete, il y a toujours des autres mots, I was being invited to participate in a dream which I had been sharing with someone I didn’t know. We are here together, as part of this dream, part of the dream that is to be a poet.
This morning we heard the question again about whether we are caterpillars dreaming we are butterflies or butterflies dreaming we are poets.
I now have the answer for you.
Obviously, we are the caterpillars. We are the agents of transformation, of change. We spin out silk so thin and fine as to be invisible, because what we work with are words. Words that create worlds.
