Street Poetry: Seventh Ave. Speaks

'The only way to knock down a wall is by utilizing it.'

The asphalt speaks...at least on La Septima, thanks to this poetry which I discovered today near the Teatro Gaitan.

The little texts and images, some offering wisdom and insight, others protests, remind me a bit of those famous writings which appeared on Paris sidewalks in the summer of '68. 

'This is Bogota' 'The logic is broken'

Someone is probably thinking that there's something cheap and unliterary about scrawling on the street. But I'd bet that few of the people who paused to read the pavement read Shakespeare or Neruda today.

'I have dreamed more than I have lived.'

'Colombia, somebody is using you.' (A dig at the United States.)

'We only want to break the walls which hold up the windows.'

The Bogotá police take someone away. 

Resist!

'Secrets are welcome.'

'Without poetry there is no city.'

Many of the tree planter boxes on the car-free (during the day) Ave. Septima are also decorated with stencils and short sayings.

'Disconnect the Reception, Connect Your Transmission.'

'The Interior Fear is Fear of Discovering.'

'A Product's Value is in its Production.'

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Rafael Pombo - Not Just Kids' Stuff

Children play on a wooden iguana in Pombo's childhood home. 

One hundred years (and a few odd days) ago, Colombian poet, translator and diplomat Rafael Pombo died at age 79.

Pombo is remembered as a children's writer - which he certainly was - and you can visit his childhood home, now the Rafael Pombo Foundation on 10th St. in La Candelaria, beside the Teatro Colon. The house, built in 1833, does workshops for groups of schoolchildren and is full of colorful characters from Pombo's stories, which include Rinrin el Renecuajo (Rinrin the Tadpole), La Pobre Viejecita (The Poor Old Woman) and Simon el Bobito (Simon the Fool). 

Pombo is less remembered for his work as diplomat in New York, where he lived for 17 years and translated and adapted Anglo Saxon stories into Spanish, or that back in Bogotá he founded two newspapers and even wrote opera.

Pombo's home, in the foreground,
and the Teatro Colon beyond it. 

Rinrin the Tadpole tells the story of a tadpole - actually a frog - who goes partying with his friend the mouse. But, because they didn't listen to momma frog's admonitions, they end up being eaten by a cat and a duck. So, let that be a lesson to you, young people! (But it's a lesson lost, judging by young Colombians' partying habits.)

Characters from Pombo's stories now populate his home. 

A doorway and garden in Pombo's home. 

The Poor Old Woman 'who had nothing to eat, except for meats, fruits, sweets, cakes, bread, eggs and fish' and had noplace to live 'except for a big house with garden and garden.' And so it goes, ending with a plea to God to 'let us enjoy the poverty of this poor woman and die from the same afflliction.'

Witty and entertaining, The Poor Old Woman could also be seen as a lesson for Colombia - a suffering, afflicted nation with tremendous riches.

But it is Pombo's darker and even anguished passages which I find more interesting. He gives a hint of existential despair in El Bambuco, which begins with an appeal to 'excorcise the tedium of this miserable life' which God responded by 'providing a bambuco', or traditional Colombian dance related to the European waltz. Pombo ends the poem by saying that his greatest ambition would be to have composed el bambuco.

That poem's happy ending contrasts with his most famous existentialist piece, La Hora de Tinieblas (The Hour of Darkness), in which life is worse than a burden: 'Why was I born? Who forces me to suffer? Who created this terrible law of being and suffering?'

Predictably, that loss of faith got Pombo in trouble with the church. But it doesn't appear to have cast a shadow over the children having fun in his old home in La Candelaria.

Find 18 of Pombo's most famous poems here.

Rafael Pombo's portrait in the National Museum in Bogotá.

El Bambuco

Calle 10 is one of La Candelaria's most historic and best-preserved streets. 

Playing with a giraffe. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours, which also has La Candelaria's largest collection of used books in English, French, German, Dutch and other languages for sale and exchange.

Marquez in the Moscow Metro

In a strange case of ideological intersections with perhaps a bit of time warp mixed in, the city of Moscow's metro has decorated its 'Poetry Car' with Gabriel Garcia's Marquez's poetry.

Colombia's ambassador to Russia Rafael
Amador amidst a crowd of Gabo fans.

Marquez only a little bit of poetry (mostly sappy romantic stuff) - just enough to decorate a single car, evidently.

The Leo Tolstoy Cultural Center in La Candelaria has a small photographic display about the rolling exhibition. It's appropriate, since the Cultural Center is something of a throw-back to the old Soviet Union, with its busts of communist icons and tomes and talk about socialism's victories. Appropriately, too, Marquez is a leftist and buddy of Fidel Castro, and the subway system construction was begun by Josef Stalin, albeit before most of the world had realized what a monstrer he was.

Today, of course, the Soviet Union is gone, as is communism, replaced by a savage capitalism. But the dream lives on in a few places, including the Leo Tolstoy Cultural Center.

Lenin in Moscow's metro. 

The subway exhibition provides an excuse to reflect on Bogotá's own plans to build a subway, which are now experiencing yet another resurgence.

With 12 lines, 306 kilometers of rails and 185 stations, Moscow's metro is a colossal achievement - and some of its stations, which are built like palaces, show that. I read that the Soviets' philosophy was to make it a sort of palace for the common people, in the place of the old Czarist palaces which the revolution had overthrown. That's good enough. Decorations aside, the Moscow Metro is also said to be the world's most densely-used metro.

A Moscow Metro station - an underground palace. 

But despite all of this, Moscow is a chaotic city full of traffic jams, as you can see here:



Moscow, with about 11 million people, isn't much bigger than Bogotá, altho they do have lots more money. Thos who believe that a subway would be a magic bullet for Bogotá's transit problems ought to look at Moscow and think again.

Stained glass in Moscow's Metro. 

If Bogotá does go ahead with subway construction, the first trains probably won't be rolling for another decade, at least, and then it'll be only a single line, measuring perhaps a dozen kilometers - a few percent of Moscow's system. But in the meantime, millions more cars will have flooded into the city.

Can anybody believe that, without strong measures to discourage car use, the traffic congestion and pollution above ground won't be many times worse?

Here's good advice from one of the video's commentators: "I say tax cars at every intersection and use the monies to build public transport systems."

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Johanna, the Poetess of La Candelaria

Johanna and her poem.

You often see Johanna Henry on La Candelaria's plazas offering poems in Spanish and English for a small contribution.

I don't know her history well, but her roots are in San Andres, a Carribean island which is probably Colombia's most unlikely territory. She's also lived in different parts of mainland Colombia and says she was displaced by violent groups, who forced her to move to Bogotá.

Here's my poem. 

Today, she gave me this poem, titled


'Razon de Tu Silencio' 

'Me gusta tu silencio cauto, donde urgas mi silencio vacio. Donde me hablas sin palabras y me escuchas sin oidos....' 


Nice, but I doubt it was written by a woman who evidently has a substance abuse problem. On the other hand, who am I to judge? I couldn't find those phrases via Google, and lots of great writers have had abuse problems....

A note about San Andres:

Located off of Nicaragua's coast, San Andres forms an archipelago also including Providencia and Santa Catalina, as well as lots of atolls and banks. The first Europeans to settle the islands were British Puritans - the same folks who settled New England. The islands were later controlled by the Spanish, by pirates and even a French corsair flying the Argentine flag. After Latin America's independence, the islands decided to join La Gran Colombia - but their nationality made less geographic sense after U.S. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt chopped off Panama and made it an independent nation in order to dig the Panama Canal, leaving the islands far from the rest of Colombia. Nicaragua still has claims to the archipelago, altho Colombia's hold on it seems strong. Today, the people there speak a kind of English, tho mixed with such a potpourri of words from other languages that it's not easy for an outsider to understand. The islands' sun and sand have made them popular with tourists.

San-drenched San Andres - a long ways from drizzly Bogotá

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

25 Years of the Casa de Poesia Silva

The Poetry House's entrance hall. 

The Casa de Poesía Silva, named in honor of Poet José Asuncion Silva, is celebrating its 25th birthday this year.

A young man plays a flute
on the house's front steps.

The house, located on Calle 14, No. 3-41, in the heart of La Candelaria, was founded in honor of Silva, who died there, an apparent suicide, in 1896. Silva, whose portrait graces Colombia's 5,000 peso bill, had a sad, even tragic, life, but did manage to write some of Colombia's most memorable poems.

The room where Silva died
of a gunshot to his heart. 

The Casa de Poesia, which was Silva's family home and where he shot himself after years of tragedy, including business failures, the deaths of his siblings and the loss of much of his work in the sinking of a ship, now hosts poetry readings, talks about literature and musical events. It also has a small library and seems to be a hangout for the city's literati. The house itself was built in 1715, but has been renovated in a republican (post-independence) style. Despite its illustrious past, the house had become a cheap rooming house for decades until Pres. Belisario Betancur turned it into a cultural center in 1986.

Silva died at 31, after seeing the deaths of four siblings, including his sister Elvira, with whom some say he was in love. He also suffered business failures and was heavily in debt. The Colombian government had sent him to work in its embassy in Caracas, Venezuela. But during Silva's sea voyage home, the ship sank and he lost much of his work. Silva's surviving work totals 150 poems and one novel.

Not suprisingly, most of Silva's work is sad and sentimental, a lot of it about death and night.

The house's central patio, with Monserrate visible beyond it. 

The Casa de Poesia also pays tribute to many other Colombian poets and novelists.



Gonzalo Arango, 1931-76, was a leader of the Colombian philisophical movement called nadaism (nothingness), related to dadaism and nihilism.

"Life is a succession of happenstances and nothing is real. Only death."

Isaacs poses as a character from his novel 'Maria.'

Jorge Isaacs, 1837-95, (on the 50,000 peso bill), wrote the romantic novel Maria. The son of an Englishman from Jamaica, Isaacs was also a poet, soldier and businessman, had an eventful life, fighting in two of Colombia's civil wars. He was also a great advocate for free public education for working class people.









Jose Joaquin Casa, 1866-1951, was a politician, writer and educator. He's best known for his poem 'Cristobal Colon.' He founded Colombia's 'Academia de Historia' and headed the 'Academia de la Lengua.'







A caricature of Miguel Rash-Isla, born in 1889, who wrote lots of romantic poems - in both senses. The Secret: "I hold in my sad, restless heart a hidden love. Nobody has seen it, nor will ever see it...."















Poet Leon de Greiff, 1895-1976, and poet/journalist Carlos Castro Saavedra,1924-89.




















Eduardo Carranza, 1913-85, was a poet and diplomat. He also directed several literary publications and headed the National Library. Lots of his poetry was about love, death and his nation.










By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours