London Bombed Tonight...With Poetry

News by Kimberly Turner June 26, 2012 1 comment

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The weather for London tonight: 100% chance of poetry showers. At around 9:15 pm a helicopter will drop 100,000 bookmark-shaped poems near the London Eye to celebrate the beginning of Poetry Parnassus, the "biggest gathering of poets in world history." The poems, dropped by Chilean arts collective Casagrande, come from poets from all 204 Olympic nations and are a mix of traditional and contemporary works.

This isn't Casagrande's first poetry bombing. Focusing on urban areas that have been bombed from the sky at some point in history, thus replacing the memory of destruction with a more positive image, the collective has already showered Berlin, Warsaw, Guernica, Dubrovnik, and Santiago with words. Here's a gorgeous video of the Warsaw event. It's lovely to see people plucking words out of the air, kids getting excited about reading their poems, and the bookmarks fluttering along in front of the sunset. It makes me want to be in London tonight.

The festival it's kicking off, Poetry Parnassus, runs from today through July 1. Poets from every Olympic nation are represented, and there look to be plenty of readings, workshops, and interesting events happening. The event website isn't very comprehensive, but does have a few more details.

Any LitReactor readers going to this tonight? Please share pictures and/or poems in the comments if you happen to be there.

Photo via Casagrande

News by Kimberly Turner

Kimberly Turner is an internet entrepreneur, DJ, editor, beekeeper, linguist, traveler, and writer. This either makes her exceptionally well-rounded or slightly crazy; it’s hard to say which. She spent a decade as a journalist and magazine editor in Australia and the U.S. and is now working (very, very slowly) on her first novel. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics and lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, two cats, ten fish, and roughly 60,000 bees.

Follow @kimber_regator