One of the most interesting parts of “The Poet’s Cellist” is that it isn’t really a solo process. Even though it might look like I’m taking a poem and “adding” cello to it, it actually feels much more like a collaboration. The collaboration happens across forms.

The poet starts with language, rhythm, and image. The cello enters later, but it doesn’t arrive as an interpreter or a commentator; it arrives as another participant in the same space. And over time, I’ve realized that the relationship between them isn’t fixed. It shifts depending on what each poem brings.

Sometimes the poem leads. It has a clear rhythm or emotional direction, and the cello follows that shape quite closely, almost like it’s learning the poem’s language. In those moments, I feel like I’m listening more than I’m playing.

Other times, it flips. The cello finds something in the poem—a pause, a tension, a word that lingers—and suddenly it starts to lead the direction of the piece. The music stretches out an idea the poem only hints at. It doesn’t replace the text, but it expands it, like zooming in on a feeling the words move past quickly.

What I love about this back-and-forth is that it never feels fully settled. There’s no single “correct” way the poem and cello are supposed to fit together. Instead, each one keeps reshaping how the other is understood.

Even the gaps between them matter. There are moments where the poem says something the cello doesn’t immediately answer, or where the cello reacts in a way that doesn’t clearly match the text. Those mismatches used to bother me, but now they feel like part of the collaboration too. They create space for interpretation, like an unspoken agreement that not everything has to line up perfectly to still belong together.

In a way, I’ve started to think of it less as pairing a poem with music and more as letting both forms negotiate with each other. And somewhere in that negotiation, something new happens. Something that feels like it belongs to both, but isn’t owned by either.

That’s what makes it feel like collaboration to me. Not harmony in the perfect sense, but a kind of shared searching.

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