It’s balmy in the Children’s Garden of the Garfield Park Conservatory, a welcome respite from the blustery chill of winter. It’s Sweet Saturday, so visitors can sample coffee beans, lemon, papaya, and prickly pear, among other edible treats, and there’s the tumult of children playing.
There’s yelling and the clanging of the metal grating where children play above us and wait for a twisted slide that empties right by the poets’ table. At one point an ant crawls across the spare topic list behind the table. A few spots of crumbled earth land on my notebook. The occasional drip of water or flower bud falls from above. The distant rolling of the el shudders in the background.
Normally the money goes to Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit literary publisher started by Rooney and Abigail Beckel, but because the museum is free on this day, so are the poems.
There are other arguments against poetry, too: it’s ambiguous, inaccessible, magniloquent (whatever that means); our attention spans aren’t built anymore for the commitment and concentration it requires. Or so the arguments go. We see and feel the poetry of the world; we’re in love with the poetic, but we’re afraid of the poem.
The clamor of children is noticeably less intense and the list of topics dwindles to nothing. The last wave of commissioners comes by to pick up their poems. The poets stand up, stretch, pack up their typewriters. Eighty-three poems today.
Sun 3/8, 10 AM-4 PM, Morgan Manufacturing, 401 N. Morgan, poemswhileyouwait.tumblr.com, $10, $8 in advance. Go to poemswhileyouwait.tumblr.com for all upcoming events.
