The connection between painting, poetry and sound through the eyes of a contemporary poet and writer, Khadijah Queen. Her essay, Veil(s) in Relation, thought specifically for this episode, reflects on the series of Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil paintings and related drawings, intertwining her thoughts on the artworks with the musical pieces by Harold Budd, Mars and the Artist (after Cy Twombly), 2011, and Veil of Orpheus (Cy Twombly’s), 2012, dedicated to Cy Twombly.

In Queen’s words the “veil” becomes a physical material, and metaphorically a mediation tool in language. The artist’s paintings function as a kind of time travel, connecting history to present. The nature of transparency: what we know and believe with our eyes, what history tells us, and what facilitates or prevents that simultaneous connection.

For an immersive experience we recommend to read the essay while listening the music pieces Veil of Orpheus (Cy Twombly’s) and Mars and the Artist (after Cy Twombly) by Harold Budd.

Khadijah Queen is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, most recently Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran’s Memoir (Hachette Books/Legacy Lit 2025). Other books include I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.” With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2/University of Alabama Press 2023), a multigenre anthology featuring writers from the global majority. Queen is a Cave Canem alum, a 2022 United States Artists Disability Futures Fellow, and a 2023 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow. Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance Writing, and was performed by The Relationship Theater Company in New York City in December 2015. Individual works appear in Ploughshares, Harper’s, Gulf Coast, Poetry, AGNI, The Yale Review, and widely elsewhere. In 2025 the Foundation for Contemporary Arts recognized Queen’s work with the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Denver and teaches creative writing, literature, and literary theory at Virginia Polytechnic & State University.