t h e   c y   t w o m b l y   p r o j e c t ( s )

Over the last couple of years, I have been more or less obsessed not only with the work of the American artist Cy Twombly, but also with writing poems that enter into conversation with his drawings and paintings, many of which contain lines of poetry or are themselves responses to poems or poets or writing. My next book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, is a collection of these poems along with the Twombly pieces they talk to. It is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April of 2023 but until then, here are some samples that have appeared already in journals, books, and Websites.

P O E M S​

• "Meditation on Absolution," a short poem in response to this Twombly painting at SFMOMA, is featured on the Website for Bennington Review. Another poem, a golden shovel for Sappho and Breonna Taylor, appears in the print edition and is featured on Verse Daily. 
• Four poems with accompanying paintings and drawings by Cy Twombly in the beautiful Air/Light Magazine (thank you David Ulin).
• "Studies for Excursis," another poem that talks to Twombly's Fifty Days at Iliam + some cool images in the lovely Canadian journal, Brick (thank you Michael Helm + Allison Lasorda).
• Four poems with the accompanying images by Cy Twombly in the 4th anniversary edition of On the Seawall (thank you Ron Slate).
• "Beyond the Borderless: Dean Rader/Cy Twombly" Two new poems alongside Cy Twombly paintings in Narrative (thank you Michael Wiegers + Carol Edgarian).
• "The Inscrutability of Influence" (a poem talking to Twombly talking to Keats) & "In Advance of All Parting" (a poem talking to Twombly talking to Rilke) in The Harvard Review (thank you Chloe Garcia Roberts).
• "In Which Twombly & Rader Consider the Letter" in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. Eds Simmons Buntin, Elizabeth Dodd, and Dereck Sheffield. Trinity University Press, 2020 (thank you Simmons, Elizabeth + Dereck).
• "The Fire that Consumes All before It," a poem that enters into conversation with Twombly's massive ten-part painting Fifty Days at Iliam, accompanied by an interview about the poem, painting, and ekphrasis in Rappahannock Review (thank you Emily Saunders & Julia Manuel).
• "Meditation on Circulation," a poem responding to Cy Twombly's Untitled (1967) in the inaugural issue of The West Review (thank you Despy Boutris).
• "Troubled by Thoughts about Infinity and Oblivion, I Exit the Twombly Retrospective at Dusk and Walk the High Line with the Ghost of My Father," a new poem featured at The New England Review (thank you Rick Barot).​
• "Once Again in Thought about Rilke, Twombly's Orpheus Paintings, and Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss" in New England Review, Winter 2019 (thank you Rick Barot).
• "Unending Octet," a poem from a larger series that enters into conversation with Cy Twombly's Untitled (1969) in Waxwing (thank you W. Todd Kaneko).
• "Octet: A Fragment" + "Unfinished Sonnet" with drawings by Cy Twombly, in Zyzzyva 112, 2018 (thank you Laura Cogan & Oscar Villalon).
• "Meditation on Mimesis: Cy Twombly's Poems to the Sea" in Southern Review, Winter 2020 (thank you Jessica Faust).
• "Octets after Cy Twombly: The Ferragosto Series" in Cherry Tree, issue 5, 2019 (thank you James Allen Hall).

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C O L L A B O R A T I O N S   W I T H   T H O M A S   I N G M I R E

• Two unique artist books with calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire and poetry by Dean Rader

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E S S A Y S

• "Poetry, Painting, History, Hermeneutics: On Cy Twombly: Making Past Present" in Jacket2.
• "Notes on Williams, Abstraction, and the Line," an experimental essay on William Carlos Williams, abstraction, poetry, and Cy Twombly in The Kenyon Review.

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I N T E R V I E W S

• "Goth Tendencies, Cy Twombly, and Turnstile Hearts: A Conversation with Melissa Stein & Dean Rader" in The Kenyon Review.

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Cy Twombly, Untitled (New York), 1970