In Perspective 2 | Episode 2
Imagining soundscapes.
From Rome to San Francisco and back
Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York
First edition, 1942
Photo: Dean Rader
The insight on poetry and the deep connection with Cy Twombly and his works continues with the second episode of In Perspective 2.
The poet Dean Rader, author of the collection of poems dedicated to the artist, Before Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and the Foundation’s Managing Director and curator of the online section, Eleonora Di Erasmo, discuss about the relationship between Wallace Stevens’ poetry and a series of drawings from 1990 where Twombly inscribed lines from The Poems of our Climate (1942).
The conversation conceived in the form of a letter exchange consists of six letters sent between Rome and San Francisco from September to November 2025, “a sort of surrealist exercise” as Di Erasmo has written “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 Cy Twombly's works, Stevens' poems and 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).
