Seated on a bar stool, surrounded by Tommy Smith and the young musicians of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, he gave an electrifying performance of his poem-suite Planet Wave, dealing with nothing less than the history of life on Earth.
Still (1895-1978) was a prolific composer whose catalog includes four more symphonies, eight operas and many tone poems, suites, chamber works and vocal pieces.
Between the mid-1960s and the early 70s his forays into this field included Inventions of Symphonic Poems, Sun Suite of San Francisco and the symphonic work Skies of America.
Atwood has also published a collection of poems, "Thriller Suite," serially, on Wattpad; the book has been viewed more than three hundred and eighty thousand times since then, presumably reaching many readers who had never bought a volume of poetry.
Also on the program are Haydn Sonatas in F (Hob. XVI: 6) and G (Hob. XVI: 29), Schubert's Sonata in C (D. 840) and "Four Poems," a suite by Soong Fu Yuan.
These ten poems compose a suite, leading the reader through variations on themes — aging, marriage, the pursuit of happiness, the certainty of death — that circumscribe a personality and a much mulled personal situation related to the chronic coldness of the less resolute, less objective voice of "The North Ship".
There are four poems from a suite that respond to the history of the site are inscribed into the walls of the main sculptural installation".
In spirit, the series recalls the contemporaneous suite of poems "The Bridge," by another gay avant-gardist with patriotic longings, Hart Crane.
"Endpoint" is a perfect sonnet sequence, and as great and weirdly transparent an assessment of dying as the final suite of poems left by a far greater poet, James Merrill, in his own last days.
The writer and poet Blake Morrison treated the subject in his suite of poems Pendle Witches, published in 1996, and in 2011 poet Simon Armitage narrated a documentary on BBC Four, The Pendle Witch Child.
