Eleanor Cory – String Poet

Rehearsal – Composer and String Quartet

I listen and hear sounds by someone else,
not mine. The double stops, harmonics,
soaring on a reckless ride,
are chased on pressured strings — not mine.
I sit and turn the pages. Quartet bows
release my work. The temperature runs high
and steams the lines, the chords &mdash not mine &mdash
then freezes them. Alone, I touch the ice
and shiver, feel naïve notes &mdash soft, then loud &mdash
lift rising lines to burn in brilliant fires.
Breathlessly the supple strings abduct
my notes. I’m naked as they play.

Eleanor Cory is a composer of concert music and, more recently, a poet. Her poems have been published in Iambes and Trochees, Raintown Review, Poetry Porch: Sonnet Scroll, and Mezzo Cammin. She has composed musical settings of poems by James Merrill, Marvin Bell, Robert Creeley, Rachel Hadas, Mark Strand, Octavio Paz, W.S. Merwin, David Ignatow, Murial Rukeyser, and Wallace Stevens. In a recent song cycle, Toward the Mind, she set poems by Emily Dickinson and Richard Wilbur and added one of her own using phrases from their poems. She was the 2013 Composer for the String Poet Prize, and most recently she set a poem of her own about Occupy Wall Street and one by a Riker’s Island inmate for Ensemble Pi, which presents concerts about political issues.