During World War I, propaganda poetry proliferated as soldiers and civilians alike poured their thoughts and feelings about the Great War onto the page. Those in favor of the war wrote of valor, sacrifice, and duty, while those against wrote of the horrors soldiers faced on the battlefield – but whatever their stance, their poems all shared the evocative, emotion-stirring power that defines propaganda.
Join us at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library on Saturday, March 18th from 1:00-3:00 pm for a poetry workshop, where three talented poets from the Chicago-based organization Poems While You Wait will demonstrate how to channel the persuasive power of WWI propaganda poetry into poems about any topic. Explore what made the propaganda poems of WWI so impactful, experience a performance of improvisational poetry, and craft a poem alongside a professional poet.
Poems While You Wait is a simple and elegant interactive concept: we bring our vintage portable typewriters to a public place where you’re hanging out. Then, you give us a topic—funny, sad, serious, anything at all—and we type out an original poem. You walk away with not only a souvenir of your experience, but also with a possible gift, not to mention a memorable and unpretentious interaction with poetry.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection, Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in September 2022 by Texas Review Press and her new novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in September of 2023. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.
Andrea Rehani is a poet and writer, a certified teaching artist, a co-captain of Poems While You Wait, and a postsecondary instructor of writing. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, MAKE: A Literary Magazine, Orion Magazine, and elsewhere. Currently, Andrea is a PhD candidate in Curriculum Studies at DePaul University and has been selected as one of three recipients of the two-year education fellowship from the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning and Dialogue in Cambridge, MA.
Born and raised in a Cleveland suburb, Alex Berge went on to earn his MFA in fiction. He is a current member of Poems While You Wait, a nonprofit writing collective and is at the former Associate Editor of CRAFT Literary. Alex’s work has been in Witness. He lives in Chicago with his wife.