Poet in the City over 75 active volunteers who are involved in a range of activities including event management, marketing, film production, blogging and front-of-house roles. A dedicated audio team conducts interviews with the poets, speakers, actors and musicians featured in the events for Poet in the City's vast audio archive. Poet in the City inherited a campaign to create an Anglo-French cultural centre at 8 Royal College Street in Camden, the house occupied by the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine when they lived in London in 1873. The Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation is now a successful separate charity. Poet in the
Paul Verlaine du progrès", a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France, Emmanuel Chabrier, inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros, the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendes and others. Verlaine's first published collection, "Poèmes saturniens" (1866), though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality. Verlaine's