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A few days after I arrived in Paris this August, Peter Finch wrote me that "a good man to look up is jochan gerz, 41 rue buffon. 75, paris 5 and metro vavin, rue chaplain for low down bars." I looked in the Paris Street Directory for a Vavin on rue Chaplain, but there was no one there with that name, so when I wrote Peter again I asked him for Vavin's complete address. After writing this letter I decided to do a little more looking on my own, and I found an M. Vavin in the Alphabetic Directory. I called this person and M. Vavin answered, but he claimed his name was not "Metro" but Metranil and that he had never heard of Peter Finch. When I told him that I was a poet he became a little more friendly and finally invited me to meet him at his café. I went to "Cayla" on rue Commerce the following evening. Mr. Vavin, it turns out, is a 64 year old Russian dwarf who does odd-jobs around the café and sells birds occasionally near Notre Dame on Sundays. After we got talking, he told me that he had never been called "Metro" by anyone else but his mother and father when he was a little boy in Vladivostak, and that the reason he had invited me to meet him was that he was so curious about an American poet who would call him up on the phone and address him as "Metro." A few days later I heard again from Peter Finch who in regard to locating Vavin wrote: "my ref to vavin, was the metro stop not a man. its just an area i got to like quite a lot and lost my shirt once playing some strange kind of dice game. also enjoyed the peanuts there!" 
 
   When I went to visit Vavin the second time he presented me with nine poems written in a kind of crude colloquial French which he said he had translated from the Russian that the poems had originally been written in. He said he had intended to give me eight poems, but then decided to write a new poem about our meeting. It turned out that he knew a smattering of English, so with his help I got the jist of what he was writing and made the American versions here presented.

Vavin insists that he has not read any French, English or American poetry -- only Russian, and mostly Mayakofsky and Essenin. He also claims that the poems he gave me are the only ones he has written, and that he does not plan to write any more. When I asked him if he hadn't done some other kind of writing in the past thirty years, he said that he did have a "notebook on Toulouse-Lautrec" but that he would not show it to me. When I asked him why he had never published any of his poems before, he answered: "because no one has written me about my size."

paris, october, 1973