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Do you want recognition for your poetry by world poets?

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Hamid Ismailov Hamid Ismailov | 16:16 UK time, Wednesday, 30 May 2012

You might know that as a part of the London Games there is a great variety of cultural events taking place in UK. - the biggest ever gathering of living poets - is one of them. Poets from more than 200 countries represented at the Olympics will be taking part in it.

The organisers of this event, which will run in London's between the 26 June and 1 July, have announced that this hugely ambitious project will include readings, workshops and discussions with all the poets who were nominated through public voting.

They said: "Never have so many poets and so many languages been together in one place, with each poet contributing a poem in their own language."

The poems from each of the 200-plus countries will then be presented together in the World Record Anthology.


Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage is a well-known English poet

One of the organisers of the event is Simon Armitage, an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre. He said: "My hunch is that this will be the biggest poetry event ever - a truly global coming together of poets and a monumental poetic happening worthy of the spirit and history of the Olympics themselves."

I am representing Uzbekistan at this festival and I'm especially looking forward to the remarkable Rain of Poems, as 100,000 bookmark-shaped poems, collectively weighing half a tonne, are released from a helicopter in just half an hour, to be caught by a crowd waiting at the Jubilee Gardens next to the London Eye.


London's Jubilee Gardens

London's Jubilee Gardens are being redeveloped in time for the Olympics

Julio Carrasco, part of the artists' collective Casagrande, said that Rain of Poems had begun life in Chile after the imprisonment of Augusto Pinochet, as a celebration of the people's new-found freedom to express themselves publically.

He said: "Like the people of Santiago de Chile, Dubrovnik, Guernica, Warsaw and Berlin, Londoners have suffered heavy aerial bombing and theirs has been a city under siege. Casagrande brings Rain of Poems to London as an expression of peace and healing."

One of my poems will be flying in the sky of London too...

To tie in with the Poetry Parnassus at the end of June, we are planning a World Poetry Day at the World Service, when we'll be inviting lots of poets onto our programmes.

And that's where you come in. Whether you are ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ staff or a listener or a reader of the World Service with poetic talents, why not write a poem about London or the Olympic Games and send it to me either through comments below or ?

Your poem will be judged by the leading poets we'll invite onto the World Service and the winner will get not just their recognition, but also a special memorabilia prize. I look forward to reading your poems as I open the Parnassus to everyone.

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