I was immensely lucky with kind people who attended my seminar. The whole thing was a joy, because they were very warm and interested and English speaking! That being said the Cultural Centre actually laid out a translator with a microphone booth and earphones. Only one person took the translation. He was used to doing political translations, so he said he loved a bit of avant garde poetry for three hours! I just did a little tour of my methods - written work with disjunction, found text, mishearings, write throughs, performance, conceptual work, visual work etc... we did three workshops. One where we wrote through Coral Bracho and Octavio Paz with stolen lines to form new poems, another where we rendered a Paz poem visually, as a spiral, and a third making new poems in the Renga form, stealing lines and going multilingual. I showed some of my more out there performances on video too, they loved my boxing when ill and sound gorillaing. Met some great people, they were too too nice to me.

The day of the dead stuff here continues to amaze. The dioramas they build are so inventive, and have such a sense of humour too. The sense of immediacy of purpose that facilitates this humour and community is remarkable. Again, we have no equivalent. I also bumped into the guy from the hotel who had been separated from his wife in America. He got residency! He can go back and see his baba. I wished him well.

Holly and I made our way to the Labatorio Arte Alameda next to Alameda park where the Enemigos performance would be. A famous avant garde venue apparently, it was a remarkable space inside of a giant yellow church, a big black cube. While we waited for Mexican time to catch up with Greenwich Mean Time we went to a cafe where a man had a hat on with rabbit ears and then his fellow waiter picked up an accordian and played it with such beauty.. i was terribly heartsick for my romanian, he played romany tunes! I finally met Amanda de la Garza, who I'd written with for the Enemigos anthology, we had transliterated each other's poetry. She was remarkably friendly and charming and talented, she is a curator at the contemporary art gallery in the city and has a clearly powerful poetic presence, as well as incredible freckles, el tigre. Also there was a frog on the coffee machine in the cafe and some sort of creature next to it, see below

The Enemigos evening, the reading, were grand. Amanda, Rocio, Holly and I popped up throughout the night, to a nice intimate crowd. Amanda did a great piece with a typewriter, her poem 'dictated' as she read, and she read her transliterations after I'd read three poems from the anthology, Atacama, the one about James Harvey and the one about Newquay. We had a VJ all night collaborating too, showing videos behind us as we read, he was amazing www.vimeo.com/nomadaspace Rocio showed some of her new work, which was very beautiful and then to close, Holly and I did an improvisational piece, on an hours notice! We came up with it fast. She sat in the dark and said mean things to me while i sat in the light and said nice things to her. They dont get our humour really so it ended up being like a drama exercise! i acted so heartbroken that i made one of the sweet Mexicans weeep! haha, maybe I should be a fucking actor. It was fun though, being restrained and not being able to verbally abuse Holly as I wanted to. This picture to the left is of the audience while Amanda read one of the transliterations.

we went out for a big meal afterwards in this massive hall with hundreds of people eating and playing dominos. they were so nice to me, the extended Enemigos Mexican family, a whole host of them, like i was an old friend. Ari the panda and her pando, Sara, who moved to Mex from Berlin to study, Rocio, Amanda, loads of people. They all got my jokes and were kind enough to laugh. They ripped the piss out of me a lot too for the picture I allegedly sent for the performance poster where I look like I am in a shampoo advert, and for the fact that Eduardo, the VJ, and I, both were wearing the same clothes with the same hair. But he was a dude, so I was happy to have a twin in Mexico city. / Nearly everyone we've met in mexico is really really kind hearted and gentle, much more than england. they find it very easy to make time for you and want to speak to you.