I started “The Poet’s Cellist” with a pretty simple curiosity: what would happen if a poem didn’t just stay on the page? What if it had another voice—one that couldn’t use words, but could still feel just as expressive? For me, that voice ended up being the cello.

I don’t think of the cello as background music or accompaniment. It’s more like a second narrator in the room. The poem says something, and the cello responds not by repeating it, but by stretching it, sitting with it, or sometimes even pushing against it. It turns the whole thing into more of a conversation than a performance.

The more I worked on this, the more I realized how similar poetry and music already are. Poems aren’t just about meaning; they’re about rhythm, pauses, and how a line moves. And playing the cello is the same way. You’re constantly shaping how something flows, where it breathes, where it holds back.

One idea that really clicked for me is enjambment—when a sentence keeps going past the end of a line instead of stopping. It creates this feeling of being pulled forward, like the thought isn’t finished yet. I try to mirror that on the cello by not “closing” the sound where you might expect. Instead of neatly ending a phrase, I let it spill over, like it’s still searching for where to land.

That’s where legato comes in. Legato just means playing smoothly and connected, but to me it feels more like letting the cello speak in full sentences. There aren’t sharp breaks between notes; it all flows as one continuous thought. When I’m playing alongside a poem, legato helps the music follow the meaning instead of the structure. The line might end, but the feeling doesn’t, so the sound keeps going.

What I love about this project is that it stops being about “poetry plus music” pretty quickly. It turns into something more blended. Sometimes the cello feels like it’s finishing the poem’s thought. Sometimes it feels like it’s asking a question the poem didn’t quite answer.

I guess that’s the whole idea: letting language and sound meet somewhere in the middle. Not translating one into the other perfectly, but letting them overlap, blur, and build something that neither could do on its own.