PUTNEY-As Yellow Barn Executive Director Catherine Stephan says, “we have a delightful embarrassment of riches” in Putney on Saturday, Jan. 31, with two separate performances that commingle poetry and musical performance.
At 2 p.m. that day, one can catch cellist Eugene Friesen and poet Court Dorsey in their collaboration, “Poems with Wings,” at Next Stage.
As Dorsey describes it, the program will be “an astonishing array of poems, from dark to light, from the absurd to the sublime — socks, cats, the creation and destruction of the world — all cradled in the loving arms of Eugene and his cello.”
Then, at 3 p.m., “Music & Poetry in Conversation” — the culmination of a brief residency with an ensemble of Yellow Barn alumni and Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye — takes place at Yellow Barn’s Big Barn.
According to a news release, the Yellow Barn program will blend “moments of reflection with bursts of playfulness,” in a collaboration that “seeks to reveal a new perspective on the emotional core of each piece — musical and poetic — through thoughtful juxtaposition.”
‘Poems with Wings’
Dorsey, a poet-playwright-actor based in Wendell, Massachusetts, “has written, acted in, or directed over 30 performance ensembles,” according to the news release.
Offering solo performances of his original songs, poems, and short writings, he’s been a member of Pilgrim Theater Collaborative; he’s co-created with Massachusetts performing artists the late Jean-Claude van Itallie and Kermit Dunkelberg; and has presented at New York City’s experimental performance venue, La MaMa, among a wide range of credits and engagements.
Having appeared in film and in international activist theater, he was a founding member of the folk cabaret ensemble Bright Morning Star. As part of that group, he toured with Pete Seeger and Odetta.
Friesen of Walpole, New Hampshire, is a four-time Grammy Award-winning concert and recording artist, a composer, a conductor, and a professor at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.
Having worked, toured, and/or recorded with Dave Brubeck, Paul Winter, Paul Simon, Martin Sexton, Dar Williams, and Will Ackerman, among others, Friesen’s “passion for improvised music has been featured in concerts all over the world” a news release says, including at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where he is an artist-in-residence.
Dorsey and Friesen first performed together in 2022 as part of the Mohawk Trail Concert series in Massachusetts. A reprise of sorts, Saturday’s program will feature improvised cello and poetry readings with a focus on Dorsey’s writings.
About the integration of text and cello, Friesen says, “I feel my whole artistic life has been influenced by working with language.”
Some 30 years ago, he was invited as part of the Paul Winter Consort to attend the International Poetry Festival in New Jersey, “a kind of encampment of poets from all over the world [where] I had the chance to improvise along with Galway Kinnell, Coleman Barks, Billy Collins, Robert Bly — people on the main stage of poetry at that time.
“And I just found that my cello was responding to this language in ways that were surprising to me,” Friesen says. “That’s become a process of revelation for me artistically.”
While poems of Billy Collins and Pablo Neruda will pepper the lineup, the bulk of the poems Dorsey has chosen for Saturday come from his collection, Tiger Stripes: Poems of Shadow and Light (Human Error Publishing, 2024).
“It’s a set of mystical poems,” Dorsey explains. “One we’ll do, ‘Exegesis,’ is a kind of tongue-in-cheek look at what you might call ‘spiritual materialism.’”
He’ll read a couple of sonnets, too, from a series based on “mysteries that I came upon when I was in India many years ago, and I’ve used throughout my life.”
Some poems are older; others written in recent years, he says.
Dorsey’s poem “Light the Mechanical Man” “apologizes for the human nature of one’s own spirituality, finding itself stumbling in the streets at midnight, kind of bumping into lamp posts, etc.,” he says. “So it’s a little rangy.”
He also plans to read one or two poems from a series he wrote while working with a shaman in Tucson.
Dorsey explains that the program’s “through line would be this kind of mystical thread and how that orientation survives the current climate.”
In terms of the improvisational nature of the program, Friesen thinks that it will all be spontaneous.
“However, as I read some of the poems in advance, I definitely have some musical ideas and vague kind of imagery that will help guide me,” he says.
Dorsey’s work, Friesen comments, “has a tremendous kind of relevancy and accessibility” with its contemporary language and imagery.
“The interaction between us, I think, is probably closer to jazz than anything else I can imagine,” he says. “Not that the music necessarily would be jazz, but this quality of spontaneity, reacting to each other, bouncing off each other in that way.
“Depending on Court’s sense of rhythm and pacing and the spaces that he allows for the music, it will change every single time we do it, which is something that I find really engaging,” Friesen says.
About the timeliness of this work, Dorsey says that “in hard times when things are stressful, resilience matters. And I think these poems and this magnificent music are a sustaining force.”
He says they’re “beautiful to the ear, powerful for the heart,” while not denying the here and now.
“Part of my work is in service to the human family stumbling through the darkness,” Dorsey says.
“And in these times, threats from [artificial intelligence] compound an already-stressed and stressful climate,” Friesen adds, noting that he experiences “A.I. as kind of a big conformity machine.
“It draws upon things that have happened already,” he says. “What I resonate with in Court’s work is the feeling that it is really an expression of a visionary, that there is a mystical kind of vision, in the same way that you might associate some of the work of William Blake or even Allen Ginsberg.”
Explaining the program’s title, Dorsey says, “I’ve called this ‘Poems with Wings’ because when I read with Eugene playing, I just feel like I take flight with it.”
Tickets for the Next Stage performance are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. For more information, visit courtdorsey.com/events.
More poetry, more music
At Yellow Barn, a brief residency culminates on Saturday, Jan. 31, with a performance by Daniel Chong, violin; Jessica Bodner, viola; and Daniel Anastasio, piano, collaborating on integration of music and with the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye.
Interwoven with Nye’s verse will be selections from works by Eugene Ysaÿe, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel, Tessa Lark, Luciano Berio, Charles Ives, and Johannes Brahms.
Anastasio, a soloist and chamber musician based in San Antonio, Texas, is artistic director of several organizations, including his ensemble, Agarita, and the San Antonio Chamber Music Society.
“His programs,” a news release notes, “have included collaborations with dancers, writers, museums, photographers, glass-blowers, and more.”
In San Antonio, Anastasio met and first collaborated with Naomi Shihab Nye, daughter of a Palestinian refugee and an American of German and Swiss descent.
Having spent much of her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, where she studied at Trinity University, Nye has received numerous honors and awards for her work, ranging from the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement to the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and many Pushcart Prizes. Among other honors, she’s been a Guggenheim Foundation fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Of the residency, Anastasio notes that “if we come prepared with our own parts and we have good ears, we should be able to put it together within a day or two.”
He and Nye, past collaborators, are “working beforehand to organize the poetry,” he says, “and how it will interweave with the music.”
Once they converge in Putney, the team, with fellow collaborators Daniel Chong, founding first violinist of the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet, and Jessica Bodner, founding violist of that quartet, “can just play around.”
“That process is going to be fun,” said Anastasio. “All of us will have opinions, and it’ll be easy to make adjustments as needed.”
In preparation, Nye adds, “it’s such a pleasure to be listening to this music every day: thinking about the music, thinking about poems and sort of immersing in a slow way before we’re all physically together.”
She also finds it “interesting how intuitive it is, too, because when I listen to a piece a few times I start thinking ‘No, no, it has to be that poem,’ and I’m even writing a new poem or two to connect with some of the music.”
It’s exciting for Nye when she finds herself listening to the music and a poem “suddenly starts emerging. And because Daniel and I have done other programs together, I’ve seen how it works. It’s really an evolution, how it comes together.”
Anastasio stresses that for the process to work there must be trust.
“From the first time we worked together, it was obvious that she’s incredibly trusting and that we trust each other,” he says.
Reaching out to artists in other disciplines, Anastasio adds, especially coming from classical music, “is really important [...] because we’re so stuck in our own ways just by training. We’re trained to move our fingers. We’re trained to interpret the music at the deepest and highest levels, but not necessarily to take risks involved in embracing other modes of expression.”
For Anastasio, “it’s just jump-started a profound passion” — and that is “marrying the worlds of word and music.”
He cites an example: “We programmed something by Maurice Ravel, ‘A Boat on the Ocean,’ to one of her poems, ‘Over the Weather.’ And then that changes what was originally about a boat riding on the ocean for Ravel and all the sounds and words of that: It now becomes something that’s high up in the clouds.”
Of the experience, he says, he gets to “throw all my preconceptions of Ravel, all my classical training, out the window in terms of interpretation, and I get to be curious about what new emotional world this is generating between the combination of them.”
That’s what’s so exciting for Anastasio, who describes himself as “a musician who’s usually just stuck in, ‘Oh, boy — I better make sure I interpret this the way that it’s supposed to be interpreted.’”
Nye notes that the integration of words and music in the poem will be a mix: a poem may precede or follow a piece — or it may be inserted inside it.
With the music, she says, “the poems take on a new expansiveness. This gives them a bigger life.”
And, she adds, “it’s unpredictable: what piece will go with what poem.”
That’s because, Anastasio chimes in, “it comes fundamentally from inside the feeling of the person. [...] It’s the tone, the character, the fact that music is rhetorical a lot of the time. There’s questioning, there’s answering, there are statements” — all too complex for the likes of A.I. to tease out.
Collaborator Bodner was a key force behind the residency, Anastasio notes, adding that she is “personally a big fan of Naomi.”
Of the event, Bodner says, “We couldn’t be more excited and grateful to bring this project to a Yellow Barn residency,” calling the opportunity “a true gift.”
Nye adds that she’s eager to be in Vermont again, having years ago been featured on the Vermont State Poetry Tour.
“It was such a magnificent experience, just meeting different communities in Vermont and feeling the warmth of Vermont to the arts,” she says. “I’ve never had even a slight question about why anyone chooses to live in Vermont since that tour because it was just so loving and so beautiful.”
Of course, audiences can choose as they wish, but Stephan and Dorsey have no problem with folks creating a double bill of sorts: “attend half of one event and all of the other” or the other way around.
The two note that the “Poems with Wings” will end at 3:30 and the second set at Yellow Barn will begin around 3:45.
Admission to the Yellow Barn is free. More program information is at yellowbarn.org. At the Big Barn following their performance, the artists will lead an open conversation with the audience.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.