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.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Born and raised in a Cleveland suburb, Alex Berge earned his MFA in fiction from West Virginia University. He currently lives with his wife in Chicago, where he’s a member of Poems While You Wait, a non-profit writing collective. He is the former associate editor for CRAFT Literary and his fiction can be found in Witness.
Eric Plattner is a co-founder of Poems While You Wait & co-editor with Kathleen Rooney of René Magritte: Selected Writings. He teaches first-year writing at DePaul University, & lives, writes, & walks in Chicago. If you see him, honk, & he'll fix your typewriter for free.
Andrea Rehani is a Poet and Writer. She is a certified Teaching Artist, a Co-Captain of Poems While You Wait, and an Instructor of Writing Composition at North Park University and DePaul University. As a poet of Poems While You Wait, Andrea’s typewritten poetry can be found on https://poemswhileyouwait.tumblr.com/. Her writing has been published in Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, MAKE: A Literary Magazine, Orion Magazine, and elsewhere. Currently, Andrea is working on her PhD in Curriculum Studies at DePaul University.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a founding member of Poems While You Wait, and the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin's, 2017) and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Atlantic, the North American Review and elsewhere and she teaches at DePaul.