an interview with poets Kathleen Rooney and David Landsberger about Poems While You Wait, their impromptu poetry event
In the midst of the pounding music and the drunken laughter at yesterday’s Wicker Park Fest, there was the tap-tap-tapping of an antique typewriter. Chicago poets Kathleen Rooney and David Landsberger were on hand to create original, customized poems for anyone with a topic in mind and $5 to donate to Rose Metal Press and 826 CHI. They called it Poems While You Wait, and they didn’t make you wait long, either.
I visited their tent with one of my BFFs, Monica. We wrote our topics into a spiral notebook, paid our donations, and spent half an hour walking around and chatting. When we returned, we were astonished to find that Monica’s poem, “Labyrinth,” wasn’t written by either Rooney or Landsberger, but rather, by a 12-year-old poet named Phillip Ramey (the poem is included in its entirety, as typed, below the interview). Turns out, there were three students from 826 CHI present to lend their considerable talent to the event. It was a fantastic start to what I’m hoping will be a fantastic tradition. I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be able to say that I’m going to the market to pick up a poem and, since Curbside Splendor already sells its books, along with others by indie presses, at the Logan Square Farmer’s Market, I imagine that day is not so far away.
You might think that one would want to follow up a poetry-writing marathon with, say, a mind-numbing-reality-TV marathon. Not so for Rooney and Landsberger. They took the time to answer a few questions for us here at Literary Chicago, making us squeal with delight like kids after a ride on a roller coaster: “Again! Again! Again!”
Did you really need to come up with a way to make poetry writing more challenging? Isn’t it enough that poetry slam has made it necessary for good poets to be good performers, too? But now timeless works of art get developed in an hour or less, like photos at Walgreen’s? What’s next? Poets on both stilts and roller skates, balancing bowls of grenades on their heads while they chisel poems onto the sides of buildings?
KR: Oh my god, are you eavesdropping on us or something? Dave and I are totally doing the stilts/skates/grenades/chisel thing at another street fest next weekend! J/K.
But that’s a great question. To answer it, to a degree, all poetry IS difficulty; all poetry consists of setting up artificial impediments to normal communication. Like: Let’s take this highly specific thing that I want to express and force it to be strictly rhymed and metered, extremely compressed, and written with line breaks—those prohibitive conventions are where a lot of poetry comes from. So it’s not so weird to do poetry on demand if you think of it that way. And I don’t think there’s any risk of Poetry on Demand putting other types of poetry out of business so to speak—neither Dave nor I would want to ONLY write poetry this way. But it’s always interesting, if you’re feeling blocked or uninspired or want to take your work in a new direction, to add restrictions—to make poetry harder. And adding an audience participation component and a time limit certainly pushed us in ways we wouldn’t have gone otherwise.
But that’s not primarily why we did this. We did it for charity, of course, but also we did it to interact with a wider and more diverse audience than poetry often receives. So much hand-wringing goes on in poetry reviews and criticism about how “People don’t like poetry; poetry doesn’t speak to the People,” but doing Poetry on Demand at Wicker Park Fest seemed to reveal that once you stop talking about the “appreciation” of “poetry” by “people” in the abstract and let people experience poetry as part of their weekend entertainment, plenty of them end up appreciating it a ton, and they end up doing so in a way that’s actually fun and sincere, not in a dutiful do-this-because-it’s-good-for-you sort of way. Also, having people pay for the poems was a key part of the experience too—when people get something for free, as most poetry is, they MIGHT appreciate it, but when they’ve given you a request and backed that up with five bucks, they’re going to read and re-read and hopefully really think about whatever it is you’ve tried to give them.
DL: Charity was the origin of the event. It made perfect sense since I’m an afterschool tutor at 826CHI and Kathleen is one of the powers that be at Rose Metal Press.
I kind of want to steal your ideas? Is that ok? I’ve always wanted to write a poem as I free fall out of a plane and deliver it when I land. I’ve always wanted to hang glide and drop poems on a city. I tried to get a crowd sourced poem going at Pitchfork this year but the higher ups deemed it not worthy. I’ve shouted poems out of a megaphone while driving a Ferrari 360 GT Spyder convertible. Kathleen and I both are participants in The Chicago Poetry Brothel. I think it’s safe to say we enjoy decontextualizing poetry.
Kathleen’s right, it’s odd how the 5 bucks legitimizes the poetry. Poetry as enterprise/commerce is a weird, fragile thing. In my opinion poetry isn’t broken, but the business model of poetry is broken, which means in today’s world it’s broken in every way to a lot of people. I kept scratching my head at how many people are willing to sardine together on a 95 degree day to hear a band they’ve never heard of at one of the stages, but our table wasn’t nearly as claustrophobic. A lot of poets say “ah well, that’s the way it is,” but I don’t buy it. You’ve got to make people care again, and I think writing poems on demand or for a commissioned event is a very viable and realistic way to get people interested.
It all comes back to David Blaine stuff. A lot of magicians hate him, but that’s because he’s really a performance artist at this point. And he’s too commercial for performance artists. To me he’s like Evel Knievel, and that’s cool as all heck. Are Kathleen and I like Evel Knievel? No, we’re just poets getting out of the comfy writing chair, out of the air conditioning. And that confuses a lot of people who walk by. But confusion is way better than indifference.
(more…)
a review of James Payne’s poetry collection, Austerity Pleasures
