Music

When you talk about poetry, you use musical terms like voice, rhythm, and meter. We expand this vernacular and, rather than saying poetry is like music, we perform poetry as music. We sing the words, we beat the rhythm, we drop the meter on the measure and find your spine with lyrical lines.

We've done Wordsworth's Daffodils as a do-wop a cappella. We've done Plath's Mirror as a polka, Wilcox's Solitude as a bossa nova, and Longfellow's Snow-flakes as a haunting ballad. We have originals, too, that teach about cowboy poetry from the other side of the fence, and how every poem by Emily Dickinson can be sung to the tune of A Yellow Rose of Texas.

Below is a partial list of our musico-poetic treatments, as well as some of our originals, many of which appear on our various recordings:

• The Tyger ~ William Blake
• Trees ~ Joyce Kilmer
• Daffodils ~ William Wordsworth
• Funeral Blues ~ W. H. Auden
• 100s of ways ~ Rumi
• Sea Fever ~ John Masefield
• Jimmie's got a goil ~ E. E. Cummings
• Minute I heard ~ Rumi
• Emily Dee ~ The Dead Poets
• Because I could not stop for death ~ E. Dickinson
• Rubbin' Brown Bellies ~ The Dead Poets
• Crocodile Tears ~ The Dead Poets
• How doth the little crocodile ~ Lewis Carroll
• Blue Breaks Through ~ The Dead Poets

• A Red, Red Rose ~ Robert Burns
• Snow-Flakes ~ H.W.Longfellow
• Solitude ~ E.W.Wilcox
• Life is fine ~ Langston Hughes
• Poet Cows ~ The Dead Poets

• Sonnet 18 ~ William Shakespeare
• Jabberwocky ~ Lewis Carroll
• My Papa's Waltz ~ Theodore Roethke
• If ~ Rudyard Kipling
• Mirror ~ Sylvia Plath
• Song to Celia ~ Ben Jonson
• Stopping by the woods ~ R. Frost
• On Making Certain... ~ R. Frost
• I Started Early ~ E. Dickinson
• Eldorado ~ E. A. Poe
• Hey Poe! ~ The Dead Poets
• O Captain ~ W. Whitman
• It's a Yellow Moon ~ The Dead Poets
• I Shall Not Live in Vain ~ E. Dickinson
• The Night Has a 1000 Eyes ~ F. W. Bourdillon