I’ve been singing with One Voice Mixed Chorus for almost 20 years. This summer, we will be performing Roots and Wings, a musical look back and forward to celebrate the chorus’s 30 years of building community and creating social change by raising our voices in song (nice mission statement, no?). I am beyond honored that one of the pieces we will be singing is an original composition by Marisa Geisler, entitled “The Shape of Change,” in which she has set one of my poems to glorious music.
“The Shape of Change,” which appears in my first book, Sleeping Upside Down, was written in response to Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” where he writes “Two things of opposite natures seem to depend/On one another, as a man depends/On a woman…This is the origin of change.” Well. A little too gender binary for MY taste. I imagine a world where we honor all kinds of love, where we recognize that likeness does not mean sameness, where change is not an either/or proposition but more like a spiral: “not a line/But a circle, apple of light that turns//Through time…”
If you’re in the Twin Cities this summer, please join us for this special concert during Pride weekend, June 23-24, 2018.
KateLynn Hibbard 