I’m honored to be featured in the “Creative Space” column of this month’s issue of Columbus Monthly magazine. I’m especially honored to be the featured artist during April—National Poetry Month.

Written by veteran arts writer Peter Tonguette, the “Creative Space” column highlights the unexpected spaces where selected Columbus artists find inspiration while creating new work. As Tonguette wrote, I found creative and gustatory nourishment to complete a poetry commission at The Whitney House restaurant, in Worthington.

In 2019, Columbus’ Sunday at Central concert series commissioned me to write a new series of poems for a multidisciplinary performance of The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi, featuring music, spoken-word poetry, and live-mixed digital art projections. The four violin concertos in The Four Seasons had been published in the 18^th century in an edition containing four sonnets, one devoted to each of the four seasons of the year.

The poems I drafted at The Whitney House update the sonnets published with the concertos, exploring the seasons of contemporary relationships in a blend of nature imagery—a nod to the original sonnets—and images drawn from present-day urban experience.

Every work of art is a mixture of countless silent and invisible ingredients—years of training, hours and hours of deep thought, the magic of inspiration. The place where the artwork was made, the environment that nurtured the artist’s ideas into new expressions, is almost never mentioned in an artwork’s creation story. But now it’s part of the story. Columbus Monthly’s “Creative Space” column is a testament to the creative vibrancy of Columbus, where art is nurtured where you’d least expect it.

If walls could speak.

Deep thanks to Peter Tonguette for featuring me and to photographer Tim Johnson for working his magic.