Richard Gwyn

Poems for staying at home (Day 29)

Today Piedad Bonnett sings the praises of the oft-neglected sea cucumber. I once spent so long trying to find her house in Bogotá, in a taxi with Jorge Fondebrider and a clueless driver, that she thought we’d been… Read More

Poems for staying at home (Day 4)

  Today’s poem on the ‘house’ theme comes from Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, whose inventive and gently humorous poetry is among my favourite of any being written today. I think of Rómulo as an exponent of ‘slow’ poetry, his… Read More

Landscape with Beggars

  Landscape with Beggars Juan Manuel Roca   The good people wonder Why a tattered rabble of beggars Block their prospect of the lilies. If they don’t receive their ration of manna, It’s due to their savage custom… Read More

Where are the others, Señor British Citizen?

Landing at Bogotá must be quite challenging for an airline pilot. The city is on a plane high in the Andes, and both times I’ve landed here we’ve come down with a bump. Lonely Planet online warns its… Read More

Epic poetry and canine aficionados

Posting a few pictures as a last offering from my trip to Colombia: The lettering on the banknote displayed in the wall graffiti suggests that a thousand poor die for each 1000 peso banknote in the idle republic… Read More

Medellín, drugs and arse cake

Medellín, once the domain of drugs baron Pablo Escobar, where I am attending the International Poetry Festival, is also the city of Fernando Botero, the painter and sculptor of all things obese. Wandering through the city streets this… Read More

Midday: story of a kidnapping

Bogotá is the kind of place designed to make you feel conspicuous if you are toting a camera around. I have heard and read too many bad things, even if the place is considerably safer than it has… Read More

The Sound of Things Falling

The Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia has a thesis in which he claims that every successful story contains within it another story. The first story narrates the action of the plot, while the second story is more or less… Read More

The Secret History of Costaguana

  A few months ago I gave up reading novels, but over the summer I cheated and devoured two, both of them very slowly, my preferred mode of literary consumption. The first was Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, which I… Read More