The Art Academy of Cincinnati and Annex Gallery have maintained a close relationship over the years. In 2017, the Academy hosted the first international exhibition of the Bridge Not Walls project, and since then, collaborations, visits, and mutual support have become a steady tradition. Annex has followed the Academy’s programs with interest, and new joint projects are already in discussion.

Members of the Annex Gallery team attended a recent poetry reading at the AAC. The event began at 6:30 p.m. and unfolded with the quiet ease that only a well-paced reading can create. Matt Hart, head of the Creative Writing Department, introduced the evening’s guests. More than a formal presentation, his remarks felt like a gesture of gratitude toward the students, colleagues, and friends who sustain the program’s creative energy. His words reflected a genuine sense of community—one that finds in poetry a shared space of encounter.

The first reading was given by Nyla Davies, a student of illustration, who presented a sequence of four poems where visual imagery intertwined with language. Her work moved between landscape observation and serene introspection, evoking the flow of the river, light, and the living substance of the environment. The cadence of her voice—tentative at first, then assured—suggested the passage from painting to poetry, as if color had learned to breathe.

The evening’s featured guest, Anselm Berrigan, shifted the tone toward a different intensity—a verbal performance combining humor, momentum, and critical insight. His dense, expansive poems register the movement of thought itself, exploring the limits of attention and meaning, where digression and error become productive forces within the poem. Berrigan’s language flows like consciousness in real time, turning the everyday into something almost cosmic. His work, often linked to the experimental legacy of the New York School, favors open forms, fractured rhythms, and an ongoing process of perception. Urban imagery and cultural references operate as a cartography of language in crisis, revealing how the ordinary and the conceptual overlap in a world saturated with stimuli.

The reading concluded without fanfare, in an attentive and reflective silence. More than an event, it felt like a shared experience—a reminder that language, when sincere, can still bring a diverse community together under a common light.

Poet and professor Matt Hart, head of Creative Writing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, founded Poems While You Wait in 2014, inspired by the initiative of Kathleen Rooney and Eric Plattner. The project invites writers to compose poems in real time on manual typewriters, based on topics suggested by the public. Proceeds from these performances support the writing program and its reading series. For Hart, the practice is an act of empathy and reciprocity that turns poetry into a shared experience rather than a private object—a moment where writer and reader meet through language. Beyond its artistic and community dimension, Poems While You Wait also serves as a pedagogical experiment that teaches attention, humility, and risk, affirming Hart’s vision of poetry as a direct and transformative form of human connection.