Afterthought

Reflecting on why I was interested in the poems in the concert programme which I wrote about while too tired to be very coherent last night, I think the experience struck me because, although I know the Emily Dickinson poems well in their musical setting by Copland, seeing them in the programme for a ocncert I wasn't attending put them at an unusual angle: the lack of music made them almost, but not quite, into pure poetry again. But especially since the programme reprinted the words as set, with the composer's repetitions and recapitulation, it was a strange halfway-house between poetry and song.