We are a collective of poets & our manual typewriters whose mission is to appear around the city in public places — street festivals, museums, libraries, theaters, & events — to provide our patrons with a magical, unexpected, unpretentious, & decontextualized encounter with poetry. No requested topic is too big or too small, too funny or too sad, too silly or too serious.

Poems While You Wait

♦Typewritten Poetry on Demand♦
♦Founded in 2011 by Dave Landsberger, Kathleen Rooney, & Eric Plattner♦

Poems While You Wait: Collective of Poets Visit Symphony Center

Nights by Andrea Rehani

A tale written in Arabic & living in a book,
earthly not divine; it was not buried yet has been lost.

The Nights has never been stable & has never stopped changing shape,
A loose collection of stories with no single author, scribe, translator.

No one can say what the Nights is: are there forty stories or two hundred?
Which one is authentic & what does that even mean?

Linguists speak of language shift, the replacement or assimilation of language,
a phenomenon observed over time through sighs of soft winds.

Speakers shift giving up their own language & language falls silent.
From the start, the Nights has been in perpetual translation—pirouettes.

What holds language—stories—memories together?
This story begins & are held together by the framing story of Shahrazad.

Shahrazad, a skillful reader & re(caller) & trills an endless song.
The library, in her mind, is her material.

A simple & eloquent plan of using stories of adventure & wonder
in a mysterious rhythm to un(cover): Truth is stranger than fiction.

CLICK —> https://cso.org/experience/article/18613/poems-while-you-wait-collective-of-poets-visi

In Focus Lecture Series: Poems While You Wait

Date

Sun, 04/24/2022 - 03:00 PM - Sun, 04/24/2022 - 04:00 PM

Poems While You Wait: A Panel Discussion on Poetry on Demand

On Sunday, April 24 at 3pm, join us for a hybrid in-person and virtual lecture, "Poems While You Wait: A Panel Discussion on Poetry on Demand," featuring Alex Berge, Eric Plattner, Andrea Rehani and Kathleen Rooney.

This lecture is a part of the ongoing EAC series, In Focus. In Focus features a variety of talks and presentations by ​artists, art professionals, historians and more!

Challenging the cliché of the solitary author toiling alone, these writers and their typewriters take to the streets (and museums and weddings and birthday parties) to compose poems for strangers on requested topics. All over Chicago itself and into the suburbs, this collective known as Poems While You Wait thrives on receiving personal prompts—and a small donation—from their customers and creating one-of-a-kind original works of art on the spot. In this panel, co-founders Eric Plattner and Kathleen Rooney, and members Alex Berge and Andrea Rehani will discuss the challenges and rewards of this improvisatory and community-centric approach to poetry, as well as the benefits of creating unexpected encounters with literature and unsuspecting human beings.