Winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Dean Rader reaches beyond artistic description to engage Twombly's work in conversation.
In 2018, just a few weeks after his father's death, Dean Rader made a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery in New York to see a retrospective of Cy Twombly's work, In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008 The exhibit led to a poem that would become the genesis of this book - from loss and fear to regret and beauty, Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cyclereaches for the embodiment of emotion and the aesthetics of possibility.
Through a range of experimental forms, including a series of octets, Rader writes to decode the gestures and energies in Twombly's drawings and paintings. He reaches past observation and admiration to create a game of echolocation, reflecting Twombly's infinite scrawls as "saddle stitch, spaghetti curl, white whirl." Even as Rader searches for proximity, examining the gaps between symbols and what they signify, the collection remains unmistakably autobiographical. From the wheatfields of his Western Oklahoma upbringing to questions of loss-first his father and then his mother, who passed only weeks after Rader finished the manuscript for this book-the poems in Before the Borderless are both elegy and prayer, for Rader's parents, for his children, for the world.
Blurring the distinction between canvas and page, Twombly's work often includes lines of poetry from many of the authors who shaped Rader's work - John Keats, Sappho, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Rainer Maria Rilke. As Rader's poems are paired with 50 color images of Twombly's paintings and drawings, the line between looking and reading is blurred. Before the Borderless awakens in the space between language and silence to pose provocative questions about art and its power to heal.
Show moreWinner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Dean Rader reaches beyond artistic description to engage Twombly's work in conversation.
In 2018, just a few weeks after his father's death, Dean Rader made a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery in New York to see a retrospective of Cy Twombly's work, In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008 The exhibit led to a poem that would become the genesis of this book - from loss and fear to regret and beauty, Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cyclereaches for the embodiment of emotion and the aesthetics of possibility.
Through a range of experimental forms, including a series of octets, Rader writes to decode the gestures and energies in Twombly's drawings and paintings. He reaches past observation and admiration to create a game of echolocation, reflecting Twombly's infinite scrawls as "saddle stitch, spaghetti curl, white whirl." Even as Rader searches for proximity, examining the gaps between symbols and what they signify, the collection remains unmistakably autobiographical. From the wheatfields of his Western Oklahoma upbringing to questions of loss-first his father and then his mother, who passed only weeks after Rader finished the manuscript for this book-the poems in Before the Borderless are both elegy and prayer, for Rader's parents, for his children, for the world.
Blurring the distinction between canvas and page, Twombly's work often includes lines of poetry from many of the authors who shaped Rader's work - John Keats, Sappho, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Rainer Maria Rilke. As Rader's poems are paired with 50 color images of Twombly's paintings and drawings, the line between looking and reading is blurred. Before the Borderless awakens in the space between language and silence to pose provocative questions about art and its power to heal.
Show moreDean Rader's most recent book from Copper Canyon Press, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (2017), was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. He is also the author of Works & Days which won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Bush Memorial Prize, and won the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Often engaging in collaborative projects, Rader is also the co-author of a book of collaborative sonnets entitled Suture with the poet Simone Muench, and he co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague. He and pressmate Victoria Chang began a collaborative poetry review series titled "Two Roads: Poetry in Dialogue" for The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. ermanent collections of Twombly's art can be found in modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Munich's Museum Brandhorst. He was commissioned for a ceiling at the Musee du Louvre in Paris and died on July 5, 2011 in Rome.
“Rader’s prismatic and experimental latest . . . transcends
descriptive or observational commentary to engage with the work of
visual artist Twombly in psychic conversation. . . . Loss
reverberates in these striking pages that thoughtfully and
innovatively consider Twombly’s work while highlighting the echoes
and tensions between poetry and painting.”—Publishers
Weekly“Rader’s responses to Twombly’s elegiac body of work are as
physical and emotionally ignited as they are intellectually
apprehended. . . . His poems glitter and bestow knowledge derived
from the surrounding art of Twombly. In turn, Twombly’s images
invite us to appreciate the visual movement of Rader’s poems. Just
as Rader’s elegiac unknown waves ‘its wand, / and a beam of light
disappears into the sky’s black hat,’ the living conversation of
poems and paintings in Before the Borderless puts the
reader in touch with the ‘everything [they] need to know.’”—Elena
Karina Byrne, Los Angeles Review of Books
“We come to poetry to take pleasure, and to ingest and face
profundities in shapes our ears and eyes prefer to prose. How does
Dean Rader help make sense of them all? Dear Reader, count the
ways.”—The Rumpus“…poems in Landscape Portrait Figure Form flirt
with the metaphysical – i.e., can talking about art still be art? –
while presenting something definite: an experience that comments on
the artistic but also delivers it, even guiding the reader
along.”—The San Francisco Chronicle“Dean Rader reads his past,
reads the landscape of his native land, especially Oklahoma,
through the lens of previous poets, such as Hesiod, his first
tutelary guide, who lead him to a vibrant, innovative, and fresh
new poetry, who point the way to his own formal making, his
poignant American version of life and labor, Works &
Days.”—Edward Hirsch "In this extended exercise in ekphrasis, Rader
presents lyrics, prose poems, and experimental forms that
interrogate the artwork of the eponymous American painter,
sculptor, and photographer. Bright images of Twombly’s creations
appear throughout the collection followed by Rader’s response. The
poems meditate on Twombly’s use of color and imagery and the
philosophical questions raised by each piece as well as speak to
Twombly himself in letters addressed to the artist. . . . The
collection considers what it means to be an artist, the connections
between visual art and poetry, and the way art can function as a
mirror for the audience, becoming a tool for
self-reflection."—Poets & Writers"Given that 'art both fills and
empties a life,' Rader deliberates on what any artist’s medium can
offer the grieving, what meaning is presented or refused by light,
color, repetition, depth, time, or silence. But he also hopes the
eclipses and asymptotes of language present more than elegy for the
grieved."—Cindy Juyoung Ok, Harriet Books at the Poetry
Foundation
"Ekphrastic poetry is a form that isn’t about the shape or rhyme or
meter of the poem, but about the poetry’s subject: visual art. In
this case, Dean Rader worked his way through the art of Cy Twombly
and created this stunning collection of poetry."—Book Riot
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