228

On June 30th, 2009, several of the foremost members of Mongolia's literary community gathered (following a typically last-minute venue change from the Zanzabar Gallery) in the Xanadu Gallery north of the State Department store for an afternoon of poetry with renowned British poet Ruth O'Callaghan.

The event was an appropriate follow-up to the event that had taken place almost exactly a year before at the Khan Bank theater with American poet David Lehman, which several of the same people (U.S. Ambassador Mark Minton; literary translator Simon Whickham-Smith; Mugi Oyoo and Gombajav Mend-Oyoo of the Mongolian Academy of Culture and Poetry) had attended. The Academy of Culture and Poetry was largely responsible for Ms O'Callaghan's presence, and the Mongolian Writers Union also helped though its director, my old boss Khaidav Chilaajav, is currently in Seoul on a writer's residency.

The wine was warm, the dixie cups leaked, and the Gallery was hosting us on such short notice that someone forgot to turn off the music and the blenders at the bar, but it's a testament to Ms O'Callaghan's compassionate and lyrical reading that all that ceased to matter by the end. Ms O'Callaghan wasn't a poet I knew about before I turned up at the event, but both her poems themselves, with a great attention to detail and internal rhyme, and her comments about them, with such comforting and universal acknowledgement of the experience of the process of loss, had me feeling like I wanted to know much more about her and her work. It was a Mongolian event, after all, so it turned into a series of readings bogarted by poets lesser- and well-known, the males of which gesticulated and enunciated to the point of spraying spittle with their enthusiasm for speaking their poetic truths. It was a Tuesday, it was 3pm, and it was a great deal of fun.