Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cycle

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 Garca 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.

About the Author :
Dean 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.

Review :
“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 “Rader’s collection also moves beyond mourning in its gesture of lamentation. Beyond the (in)describability of death, he circles around and insistently asks about the meaning and value of life, even in the face of loss, regret and pain, and insistently searches for straw-like answers, for anchors of hope, for existential consolation in a world that threatens to be lost to us today.”—Thierry Greub, On the Seawall “In this attitude of a questioner, even a doubter, for whom “[i]mages were not enough. Poetry was not enough,” Rader sees the questions raised about everything that makes up a life.”—Thierry Greub, On the Seawall “Rader’s poems work with multifaceted breaks which, despite the ever-present reference to Twombly’s pictorial works, give his poems a high degree of independence in terms of form and content. Surprising insights arise not only when reading the poems, but already in the contemplation of the poem structure or the way the words are strung together, which in turn have an effect on the way Twombly’s paintings are viewed.”—Thierry Greub, On the Seawall