Champions of Verse

Sports fans are not necessarily renowned for their literary tastes — their passions oft running less to soulful ruminations than to beer-fueled stadium chants — so Olympics observers may be flummoxed by the sudden proliferation of poetry related to the 2012 Games. This weekend, international poets have converged on London to orate in 50 languages at a festival called Poetry Parnassus, with 100,000 copies of their collected work to be dropped by helicopter on the venue by the Thames. Another poetic project, “The Written World,” will feature a poem from each of the 204 competing Olympic countries read live and broadcast daily by the BBC.