(cover photograph by Margaret Garrett) . A few years ago, I saw Jane Campion's film 'Bright Star" about John Keats, and was moved by how beautiful his poetry was when spoken aloud. The next day, I pulled a volume of Keats poems down off the shelf and started reading through it, and at one point I began to hear music in my mind. I quickly sketched out what I was hearing, trying to translate the feeling of the poetic line into music. I made a complete "lead sheet" with melody, chords, and some basic rhythmic and textural ideas. I did this again the next day, and then the next, and this process went on for 41 days. 41 days, 41 sketches. I left this material in a notebook for a couple of years, not knowing whether I would ever make pieces out of them or not. Then one day I pulled out the sketches, curious about whether I would still like them, and found that out of my 41 sketches, I still liked 21 of them. Out of those 21, these 15 are ones that I felt worked together as a set. When fleshing out the pieces for solo piano, going from sketch to composition, it was my goal to maintain the freshness, directness, and improvisatory quality of the original sketches.