POETRY BEYOND THE PAGE
Words don't always remain where they were written.
Across Bill Pezzimenti's creative life, poetry and storytelling have found expression beyond pen and paper, moving into music, performance and film.
From a poem transformed into song and preserved within the Smithsonian Folkways archive, to a contemporary film opera exploring love, memory and the fragility of the human mind, these works reveal another dimension of Bill's writing.
Different forms. Different voices. The words remain at their centre.
SHAPED BY TREES
A Film Opera
Written by Biasino William Pezzimenti
Music by Constantine Koukias
Shaped by Trees is a contemporary film opera written by Bill Pezzimenti in collaboration with internationally acclaimed composer and director Constantine Koukias.
Currently in pre-production with Foundation IHOS Amsterdam, the work brings together poetry, music, opera and cinema in a story exploring love, memory, desire, belief and the fragility of the human mind.
THE STORY
At the centre of Shaped by Trees is Eva, a woman living with Alzheimer's disease and a failing heart. As memory becomes increasingly unreliable, the story moves between three stages of her life, blurring what happened, what may have happened and what has been reconstructed by the mind.
As a young woman, Eva is independent and rebellious. She meets Monte, an Aboriginal seminarian whose life has been shaped by his Catholic faith. Their relationship brings together two very different worlds and becomes a story of love, desire, spirituality and the beliefs that shape the lives we lead.
At sixteen, before this relationship begins, Eva finds refuge from her troubled family life in a poem called Shaped by Trees. She returns to its words repeatedly, escaping into nature, love and imagination.
The poem sits at the heart of the work and gives the film opera its central metaphor: like trees, we are shaped by what happens to us. Some grow straight, others bend and become gnarled by love, loss, memory, belief and experience.
As Eva grows older and Alzheimer's begins to alter her memories, the story asks an even deeper question: what remains of us when memory itself can no longer be trusted?
FROM WORDS TO FILM
Shaped by Trees was conceived specifically as a film opera rather than a traditional stage production. Moving between different periods of Eva's life, cinema allows memory, reality and imagination to merge and separate as the story unfolds.
Bill developed the work with Constantine Koukias, an internationally acclaimed composer, opera director and producer whose career spans opera, film, music theatre and installation. His work has been presented internationally and includes commissions for the Sydney Opera House and MONA.
Developed in association with Foundation IHOS Amsterdam, Shaped by Trees remains in pre-production and is currently included among IHOS's 2026/27 projects.
STILL LIFE
From Poetry to Song
Still Life began as a love story.
Bill was just 21 when he wrote the song for American folk singer-songwriter Nancy Lee Baxter. What began as something deeply personal between two young people would eventually travel far beyond the moment in which it was written.
Nancy recorded Still Life, and in 1982 the song was released through New York's influential Fast Folk musical community, an important platform documenting the city's vibrant folk and singer-songwriter scene.
Decades later, that recording is preserved within the Smithsonian Folkways archive — an enduring home for a song that began with a young writer putting love into words.
For Bill, the story of Still Life represents one of the earliest examples of something that has continued throughout his creative life: words moving beyond the page and finding expression in another form.
Nancy Lee Baxter
American folk singer-songwriter Nancy Lee Baxter was part of the New York folk community documented by Fast Folk during the 1980s. Her recording of Still Life appeared on The CooP: Fast Folk Musical Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3 in April 1982, alongside recordings from other artists within the city's singer-songwriter scene.
LEAVE IT TO TEDDY
Radio Comedy & Satire
In the 1980s, while working at WZIR-FM (Wizard Rock) in the United States, Bill wrote Leave It to Teddy, a short, topical mini-radio show parody produced by Jeff Gordon.
The mini-show was a direct, adult-oriented parody of Leave It to Beaver. It took the squeaky-clean, wholesome tropes of 1950s and 60s suburban Americana and flipped them into highly topical, raunchy and double-entendre-filled comedy sketches.
Bill was not only the main writer behind the scripts; he also stepped behind the microphone to voice Teddy. It was an early expression of a creative thread that continues through his writing today: observing human behaviour and finding humour in its contradictions.
