A recent performance at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill showcased an unlikely collaboration between a Lexington poet and a Vermont composer, creating what some observers are calling a fresh approach to experiencing literature through music.

According to the Kentucky Lantern, the performance featured "The Bucolics Project," a musical adaptation of poems by Maurice Manning, a professor of English and creative writing at Transylvania University. The Vermont composer Brendan Taaffe and Manning have been collaborating for the past ten years to create musical settings of the poems in Manning's 2007 collection, Bucolics.

Manning has published five books of poetry, including The Common Man, which was one of three finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and his first collection, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was selected for the 2000 Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Each song is based on an archival field recording from the Appalachian Sound Archives at Berea College, Kentucky, with Manning translating the original poem to match the metrical structure of the source recording while Taaffe changed the music to create a new song that sounds like a cousin, not a copy, of the old.

The performance took place at the Meeting House of Pleasant Hill, located in Mercer County about eight miles northeast of Harrodsburg near the Kentucky River and founded by members of the Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, known as the Shakers, in 1805. The site was home to the third largest Shaker community in the United States between 1805 and 1910.

Manning said the acoustics of the Meeting House itself became part of the artistic experience. "The audience is hearing it and not reading it, but it's even more dynamic because of the instrumentation and also being in the Meeting House, which is like its own acoustic instrument," he explained.

The performance featured singers including Sarah Kate Morgan, who teaches traditional music at Hindman Settlement School. The album version of The Bucolics Project was released in October 2025.