Fox Songs

Program Notes

This cycle began with Jane Hirshfield: a long-time devotee of her work, I had always particularly loved her Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight, so when I stumbled upon Caki Wilkinson’s incredible Fox, the two seemed a natural pairing. The contrast between the two fascinated me: the ways in which these two poets position the same metaphor (a fox) in two completely different ways is almost like a litmus test of their voices—like asking stylistically-different artists to paint the same still life. When my very good friends, Ann Moss and Alex Nowakowski, mentioned that they had space on upcoming recitals and asked if I had anything brewing, these poems had just fallen into my lap, and this cycle came to life. To round out these poems, I asked my very good friend Anastasia to complete the set, thrilled to see what they would do with that same image. (Unsurprisingly, they knocked it out the park.) This format—a set of songs that orbit a single metaphor—satisfied me so much that I already had two other sets of poems queued up before I finished this one.