Cy Twombly, Untitled (Contemplation of the Chrysanthemum), 1984-2002
[Boca Chica, Key West-Gaeta]
Pages 15-16: Acrylic, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, pencil on handmade paper with irregular size
Page 15: 22 1/2 x 14 15/16 in.
Page 16: 22 11/16 x 15 1/16 in.
© Cy Twombly Foundation
Dean Rader and I had been discussing for some time the idea of publishing a conversation on In Perspective about the relationship between Wallace Stevens’ poetry and the works of Cy Twombly. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to have a conversation in the form of a letter exchange.
Writing letters is unusual in our frenetic times. It requires you to stop, to be silent, and to dig deep into your thoughts. The act of writing is an exercise that requires slowness.
I liked the idea that our conversation about Cy Twombly and Wallace Stevens would blend with our respective daily lives and the influences we would encounter in the months to come, so that they could become an integral part of it. In the same way as a poem by Stevens or a photograph by Twombly, art blends with life and life blends with art. This gave rise to a conversation consisting of six letters sent between Rome and San Francisco from September to November 2025. A sort of surrealist exercise, a cadavre exquis, where one person's thoughts end and the other's begin and come to life. It was almost natural to find connections between Twombly's works, Stevens' poems, John Crowe Ransom’s writings on poetry, field recordings, music compositions by La Monte Young and Steve Reich, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Jorie Graham, as if everything were actually part of a whole and our incessant search for meaning took only different forms, but the end point always remained the same... “Perhaps/ The truth depends on a walk around a lake” (Wallace Stevens).
tracing basalt in the onsernone valley
Recorded and composed by Pablo Diserens and Ludwig Berger
Inspired by the life and writings of Basalt (1910 - ?) — all texts by Basalt
Photographs by Pablo Diserens
Produced during residencies at casadirosa in Loco, Ticino
Published by forms of minutiae + vertical music — fom 17 + VM16 — 2025
Courtesy Pablo Diserens and Ludwig Berger
For an immersive experience we recommend to read the letter exchange while listening the sound project tracing basalt in the onsernone valley by Pablo Diserens and Ludwig Berger.
A letter exchange between Dean Rader and Eleonora Di Erasmo about Cy Twombly, Wallace Stevens, poetry and sound in the works of the artist.
© Dean Rader
© Eleonora Di Erasmo
Delight lies in
flawed words and Stubborn
Sound
WS.
-
Cy Twombly, Untitled, August 16, 1990
[Bassano in Teverina]
Acrylic, oil stick, pencil, wax crayon on handmade paper with irregular size
27 3/4 x 22 1/16 in.
© Cy Twombly Foundation
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.
I am deeply grateful to Dean Rader for taking part to this "experimental conversation" and for his enlightening thoughts on Cy Twombly and poetry, to Gino dal Soler for his inspiring interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and to Pablo Diserens and Ludwig Berger for their precious collaboration to the episode.