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A teenage prodigy who worshiped Joni Mitchell, Ricky Ian Gordon has made a career turning novels and poems into operas and song. “I was that kid who was invited to the party because I could play anything, no matter how hard, and incite everyone into singing all night,” he writes in his  memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera. But that exuberant talent has an undercurrent of pain and sadness that has shaped and colored his life and career. It’s there in his opera of John Steinbeck’s depression-era novel, The Grapes Wrath, as well as his musical interpretations of poems by Langston Hughes, ee cummings, Emily Dickinson and the contemporary poet, Marie Howe, whose poem “What the Living Do,” has become a deeply personal touchstone for his life and work.