Chrysalis sets the eponymous poem by the young poet, Ivanna Yi, whom I met in an art-songwriting course at Yale. Ivanna’s deceptively simple, lyrical poetry was a revelation to me.
The poem I have not written
comes to me in my sleep,
a woman dressed in white.
I have been waiting for you,
I tell her. After all this time,
why are you still unwritten?
Without shame she slips out of her dress.
I tried to become a poem, she says,
until I became human.
Chicago Classical Review
“Nicholas Phan took the stage in the second half of the intermission-less program with a pair of songs by Sarah Kirkland Snider. The tenor captured the room with a haunting a cappella setting of William Blake’s “Mad Song.” Violinist Yuan-Qing Yu and cellist Kenneth Olsen traced gauzy lines around [Nicholas] Phan’s plaintive, austere vocalism in “Chrysalis,” in which the speaker—in a dream—encounters an unwritten poem in the form of a woman. The results were mesmerizing.”
