A Note to Alvaro You can be happy in Australia as long as you don’t go there. —Alvaro de Campos, June 4, 1931 A poem is a clear defiant thing and what you wrote in 1931 sounds funny from a naval engineer who never saw the place where I was born. You lacked a certain gravitas and calm unlike your captain friend Pierre Loti. Yours is a sad bewildered poem. My home town was pretty much like yours, a great port on the sea lanes of the world. I remember the liners, the merchant ships, the yachts, the…
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