Poems Exploding Like Bombs: Casagrande and Poetry’s Public Spheres

I wrote this piece for Poetry & Popular Culture to coincide with W. H. Auden’s birthday. Casagrande member Cristobal Bianchi visited UF this year and spoke about the Bombing of Poems project–currently the largest-scale poetry event in the world. Using a helicopter, Casagrande has flown over cities that endured aerial bombardment and dropped poems: Santiago (2001), Dubrovnik (2002), Guernica (2004), Warsaw (2009), Berlin (2010), and London (2012). For the European events Casagrande printed bookmarks with the work of poets from Chile and from the host city, translating each into the other’s language. Here are Cristobal and I on campus, and some of the bookmarks dropped over Berlin and London. You can read the full blog piece here on P&PC, where you’ll also find Carolyn Bradley’s translation of a poem by Rodrigo Rojas.  – MB