(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- On a recent crowded afternoon at the Chicago Artisan Market, one could hear the clacking of manual typewriters beneath the din of shoppers.
These are the anachronistic tools of Chicago's own Poems While You Wait, which was founded in in 2011 by Dave Landsberger, Kathleen Rooney and Eric Plattner.
Rooney explains: "All the [typewriters] are vintage. Today we have machines from the 1950s, `60s, and `70s. We have this mission, which is just to provide an unexpected, unpretentious encounter with poetry. And I think a lot of people have, in their past, negative experiences with poetry, and we just want to say it is for you and you can have fun with it."
The group is part of the not-for-profit independent publisher Rose Metal Press. For a $10 donation, the poets at the artisan market were writing customized poems, taking their cues from customers.
"Today, we've done love, we've done a dog named Sunny D in Paris, we've done death. So, it can be anything; funny, sad, serious, heavy, light, and it's really fun to see what people trust us with,” Rooney said.
WBBM Newsradio requested a custom-made poem about baseball. Liz Hildreth composed it on her typewriter in a matter of minutes and then read it:
"Baseball. No one cries in baseball, not even the White Sox.
There is a certain elegance, the bats, the hot dogs, even the drunk guy who falls down the stairs, it has to happen.
It's a national pastime, a sickness really.
When is the next game?
I have a handkerchief in my party, and I'll cry if I want to."
Hildreth said there's something special about creating poetry on a typewriter. It makes the writer more careful.
"You don't know what you're going to say or what sentence is going to go first, so it's always really different."
The typed poems are given to the customers -- the only hard copy that exists. But the poets normally do take a photo of them as well, for their own memory and records.
Plattner, one of the co-founders of Poems While You Wait, keeps the old typewriters in working condition so that new art can keep springing from an old source.
"If people think that they don't like poetry they should come meet Poems While You Wait, and we well help them think again,” Rooney said.
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