Literature Turned to a Painting
DEAN RADER
&
COLE SWENSEN

The second season of In Perspective opens with a special episode dedicated to poetry through the words and the poetic works by the poets Cole Swensen and Dean Rader.

In Perspective

Literature Turned to a Painting
DEAN RADER
&
COLE SWENSEN

The second season of In Perspective opens with a special episode dedicated to poetry through the words and the poetic works by the poets Cole Swensen and Dean Rader.

And yet all paint is

liquid when alive, and thus all painting is the proper ty of water,

with which it must make its peace before it can go on to anything else.

Twombly addresses this by addressing the sea, over

and over, because it is that which must be crossed.

Cole Swensen, "Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro 1981-84"

―

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, 1981-1984

[A Painting in Four Parts]

[Bassano in Teverina]

Part I: Oil paint, oil based house paint, oil paint [paint stick] on canvas

66 x 78 7/8 in.

Daros Collection, Switzerland

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, 1981-1984

[Bassano in Teverina]

Part II: Oil based house paint, oil paint, oil paint [paint stick] on canvas

61 3/8 x 80 1/2 in.

Daros Collection, Switzerland

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, 1981-1984

[Bassano in Teverina]

Part III: Oil based house paint, oil paint on canvas

61 1/2 x 80 1/2 in.

Daros Collection, Switzerland

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, 1981-1984

[Bassano in Teverina]

Part IV: pencil on paper

16 1/2 x 11 5/8 in.

Daros Collection, Switzerland

Through the conversation between the poets Cole Swensen and Dean Rader as well as the reading of their poetic works dedicated to the artist, we will be accompanied to an in-between space, where poetry becomes paint and paint becomes poetry, where poem and handwriting are not definitive but living things, where the artist’s paintings look landscapes established by shades of greens “deep and full of life” and the “white” of his sculptures is a constant opening, “an enactment of a borderlessness.”

Everything white is turning

into a white wall

'And we

who always thought of happiness climbing' Rome, 1974.

Cole Swensen, "The Future of Light"

―

Cy Twombly, Sculpture Detail, Gaeta, 1990

Below is an excerpt from the conversation:

DR (Dean Rader) – Similarly, I think he is very intrigued by the work that poetry does. It is in this in-between space, between connotation and denotation, between making things clear and making things obscure. And I feel like he wanted to do in paint and on canvas what a poem does on the page. To be in this place that is both accessible but also requires decoding and interpretation. I think generally we see differently than we read, and I think he was attracted to the process of reading. And, I think he wanted viewers to sort of grapple a little bit with the dual acts of reading and seeing, the way poetry activates the heart and the head.

CS (Cole Swensen) – Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And I’m thinking about the idea that so much of his handwriting is difficult to decipher, and I think one of the results of that is that it remains ever emergent. It never gets read in a way that’s definitive. We’re always in the process of continuing to read. It’s always somehow changing, and there is also the pronounced awkwardness of it, and that I think also has the viewer constantly stumbling in a way that achieves its own kind of dynamic equilibrium.

DR – I think it might be in that same essay where you ask (and it’s a line I steal for a poem in my book): Why does Twombly always look like he’s writing with the wrong hand?

CS – Yeah, yeah, and he does, so again what is the sort of grace in awkwardness? And I think a lot of his work achieves just that. I was also thinking, you know, so he quotes poets all the time, but he often changes things in the passages, and so I think what I feel about, you know, that seems to be an active engagement with the poet. I don’t feel like it’s a violation at all of the poet’s work. Instead, it’s a conversation. It’s an activation of the work in a different way.

DR – Yeah, I think of it as an interaction, an engagement. I think he enters into conversation with the poem in a really interesting way, and he’s willing to change it to kind of make it suit his needs.

CS – Yeah, and just underscoring that the poem is never done, even if it’s been printed in a book, it’s still a living thing. It can still morph and change, and I think the handwriting being slightly indecipherable really underscores that constant morphingness.

The podcast is also available on Podbean

The full transcription of the conversation can be downloaded here.

Now,

I understand that time is nothing more than pure duration,

& that the mind is a field of herons

who have lost their way.

Even so,

I will let the entire lie down in my body’s blue light

in hope that something will start

to heal.”

Dean Rader, "Once Again in Thought about Rilke, Twombly’s Orpheus Paintings, and Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss"

―

Cy Twombly, Orpheus, 1979

[Bassano in Teverina]

Oil paint, coloured pencil

76 3/4 x 59 9/16 in.

Dean Rader is a San Francisco-based poet, essayist, translator and critic. He has authored or co-authored thirteen books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Other titles include the poetry collection Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and the anthologies Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Rader writes and reviews regularly for Artforum, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, where he co-authors a poetry column with Victoria Chang. In 2020, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. His most recent book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was named by Bookriot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. Rader’s writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the MacDowell Foundation, Art Omi, The Headlands Center for the Arts. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty collections of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. A new collection, Veer, is coming out from Alice James Books in 2026 as the inaugural volume of their Jane Valentine series. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been awarded the 2025 Paul Engle Prize by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, and she has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SFSU Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She taught for ten years on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and twelve years in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University. She is also the translator of some 30 volumes of French poetry, literary prose, and art criticism and has won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Translation, the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award, and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. She divides her time between Paris and San Francisco.

When I look at this painting, I see Oklahoma, I see autumn, I see wheatfields, I see the sun and a ray of rust and the wind bending the stalks but at the same time mending them into something akin to skin smoothing itself over a body that is not there, internal swirl of the not-yet-cut, glume and awn, spike and stem, glazed gold in the long rake of late light, all spiral, all coil, here tiller and rachis, here the ligule of last leaf.

Dean Rader, "Meditation on Instruction"

―

Rader Farm in Hinton, Oklahoma.

Courtesy Dean Rader

Cy Twombly Foundation

Literature Turned to a Painting
DEAN RADER
&
COLE SWENSEN

Cy Twombly Foundation

Literature Turned to a Painting
DEAN RADER
&
COLE SWENSEN