This is simply to share a poem from a small poetry book that I have loved recently, namely Matvei Yankelevich’s Dead Winter (Fonograf Editions), which I happened to pick up in New Orleans and have been studying since. Granted, the bird on the wire was glimpsed in Birmingham today, as I walked Radu near the railroad tracks, shortly before I discovered a bird’s nest that had fallen from a tree —- which is another story, a different story, an alternate expanse, incompletely.

Here is Yankelevich in dialogue with the wires I walked along:

And because the book acknowledges that “most of these poems employ the work of others, translated or transformed,” I was reminded of how writing often emerges from dialogues and relationships to the lines of others to the point where it becomes difficult to discern where a thing begins or ends.

The question of how (and when) continuity emerges in a work or composition often comes up in discussions about process. Morton Feldman alludes to continuity and borrowing in his notes from the February 1984 seminar Frankfurt, later published as a gorgeous essay titled “The Future of Local Music,” from which I now quote:

Many times I make my continuity later, which essentially is the way Tolstoy worked. I don't necessarily work in a continuity. Usually my pieces began maybe on the tenth measure, kind of getting into it. And then I would look at it and throw away the first ten measures. And that's why my music has always that opening, you see, because I borrow from all different things. I'll tell you how I get my opening. I got it from Kafka. I read an article once on Kafka, and I was very fond of Kafka. You'll notice Kafka's first sentences: "Someone has been telling lies about Joseph K." You know that's Kafka, you are in the world of Kafka. We were all reading Kafka in New York at about twenty, twenty-one, fantastic thing. I took that idea and I put it into my own music. Kafka definitely influenced my feeling of how to begin a piece.

Immediately in the atmosphere. Not like Bartók, mesto or something, another mesto.