Week in Review

Things I've found inspiring this week:

National Poetry Month officially kicked off with the release of Pikes Peak Poet Laureate Aaron Anstett's project. The Poetry While You Wait booklet features 40 local local poets. The books are being placed in waiting areas and lobbies. Want a copy? Stop by COPPeR's offices to pick some up--just promise to distribute them at your hair salon, doctor's office, mechanic, vet, or any other place people wait. Table tents and posters featuring poems from the booklet are also being disseminated at restaurants, businesses, and in storefront windows. KRCC is also airing high frequency, daily poems from the collection read by the poets themselves.

When you stop by our office (corner of Colorado and Tejon in downtown Colorado Springs, across from McKenzie's in the Plaza of the Rockies), you can also visit the beautiful and serene Call and Response exhibit in the Fine Arts Center MODERN. The exhibit features a number of lovely poems on beautiful handmade paper. There's also an interactive walll where you can contribute your own poetry.

Kevin Johnson, your friendly PeakRadar.com manager, took a great art-lunch tour this week. Check out his posts on twitter by following on @PeakRadar.

This morning I stopped by Celebration Place in the Citadel mall. They have expanded their gallery space into the now-vacant Steve and Barry's across the hall. Pieces from the 47th Annual Young People's Art Exhibition (this week it's K-1; high school entries go on display next week) are now in the huge Steve and Barry's open space. It's a completely refreshing, unexpected place to see artwork. Kudos to the Citadel for letting Imagination Celebration program the space--it seems to me that this could serve as a great example to all the vacant storefronts in malls, downtowns and strip-malls across the country. If you're in the Citadel, make sure you stop in.

These are just a few reminders that art can be found everywhere. It is deliberately and delightfully planned, as above, but it is also in the landscape of the built and natural environment. It is in the design behind our home decor. It is in the clothes we wear. It is in the stories we tell each other and the way that we can make each other laugh.

I'm off to celebrate the life of a person who understood that. Timber was weird, wacky and wonderful. The lesson to the rest of us? Acknowledge the weird, wacky and wonderful inside you and all around you.