The Keats Series, is a set of 15 works, over 15 years, about 1155 feathers, much gold, the music of Brahms, and a single poem: John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, written in 1819.
Keats #1: In some melodious plot
The Keats Series, is a set of 15 works, over 15 years, about 1155 feathers, much gold, the music of Brahms, and a single poem: John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, written in 1819. I began what became the Keats Series in the year after a serious car accident, as a celebration of my return to my studio, and all that meant. I sensed before I had made the first piece that the Ode to a Nightingale contained it all: beauty and mortality, dream and possibility, and the rapture and urgency of art. Reading it over and over, I realized that it was as much about the poet writing the poem as the bird and its own song. In some melodious plot became the first of the series, from the description of the unseen spot in the trees from which the nightingale sings in darkness, pouring forth [its] soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!/
The voice of this poem, its words and cadences, images and longing, floated always in my mind in its own plateau through all the time of the making this work, a powerful source as it unfolded to me in my studio, piece to piece. It also took me to Cambridge to see the original manuscript of the poem held in the archives of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and to which I had been kindly granted access for an magical afternoon. Though I had long had a facsimile, the paper, ink and the hand that wrote it carried a different poem; it’s not that the words were different, but it was still a different poem, as if the echo of the nightingale was still within the paper. And, now, with this series done, the same question that closes the poem, asks me in my own way, as the bird flies away from the poet and beyond the poem:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Keats #15: In such an extacy!
Its own spell, I wanted to know more about John Keats; and as is my style, I read a lot about him—who he was and how he lived and how he died—and even went to a stern academic Keats Conference in London—but the best I have heard is a BBC spoken word essay by the contemporary poet, Sasha Dugdale, who herself has heard the nightingale sing:
An Ode to John Keats, Sasha Dugdale on “Ode to a Nightingale”
To view the full Keats Series, please click: The Keats Series 2004–2017.