Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly

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 Cycle reaches 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 García 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.

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. (1928-2011) was was an American painter, sculptor and photographer born in Lexington, Virginia. From 1948 to 1952, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Washington and Lee University, Lexington; the Art Students League, New York; and, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of neutral colors. His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism." Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works. Permanent 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 Musée du Louvre in Paris and died on July 5, 2011 in Rome.