Poems While You Wait: Collective of Poets Visit Symphony Center

Poems While You Wait is a collective of poets and their vintage typewriters who provide an unexpected and unpretentious encounter with poetry. Poets appear all across Chicago’s public spaces, including street festivals, museums, theaters and much more. On Saturday, May 4, they will make a special appearance at Symphony Center, where concert attendees will have the opportunity to request a poem on a topic of their choice. For inspiration on a poem related to your concert experience, enjoy a CSO commissioned Poems While You Wait poem titled Night, inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade — which will be performed by the CSO lead by Elim Chan on May 4 — written by Andrea Rehani.

Nights by Andrea Rehani

A tale written in Arabic & living in a book,
earthly not divine; it was not buried yet has been lost.

The Nights has never been stable & has never stopped changing shape,
A loose collection of stories with no single author, scribe, translator.

No one can say what the Nights is: are there forty stories or two hundred?
Which one is authentic & what does that even mean?

Linguists speak of language shift, the replacement or assimilation of language,
a phenomenon observed over time through sighs of soft winds.

Speakers shift giving up their own language & language falls silent.
From the start, the Nights has been in perpetual translation—pirouettes.

What holds language—stories—memories together?
This story begins & are held together by the framing story of Shahrazad.

Shahrazad, a skillful reader & re(caller) & trills an endless song.
The library, in her mind, is her material.

A simple & eloquent plan of using stories of adventure & wonder
in a mysterious rhythm to un(cover): Truth is stranger than fiction.

How does it work?

Getting a personalized poem just takes a few steps:

1. Give the poet your name, give them a topic of your choice (funny, sad or serious; big or small)
2. Donate $10 (all of which goes to the nonprofit book publisher Rose Metal Press) and go enjoy the performance.
3. Return at the concert intermission for your custom-made, one-of-a-kind original poem to keep for yourself or to give as a gift.

More about Poems While You Wait >> and next appearances in Chicago>>!