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
War poet Anna Akhmatova witnessed the 900-day Siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg). In 1940, Akhmatova started her "Poem without a Hero", finishing a first draft in Tashkent, but working on "The Poem" for twenty years and considering it to be the major work of her life, dedicating it to "the memory of its first audience – my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad during the siege". The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan wrote war poetry including "Todesfuge" (translated into English as "Death Fugue", and "Fugue of Death",) a German language poem written by probably around 1945 and first published in