Cy Twombly and the Poets

T WOM BLY A N D T H E P O ET S

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To read and to make nothing is to make a cathedral of oneself, the invisible kind that has no use for the general worship, points to no god but the one that is lost. That cathedral is fragile, always degrading, exhausting to repair, lost when a life is. To live quietly, inactive, and alone with all one’s hoarded reading is to live with a mind that is both alien and overcrowded, to exchange one’s thoughts for Homer’s or Keats’s, the dead poets always going on about Achilles or idleness or the sea.

To read and to make nothing, too, is to live in a lapsing ecology, all impressions out of balance, input and output disrupted, any possible equilibrium always impossible. To read and make nothing—no conversation, no further literature, no instruction, no notes—is to have only halfread, the necessarily transmutable untransmuted, all materials that exist most fully in their realization perpetually left unrealized.

But to read and make something—in Cy Twombly’s case an entire art, from beginning to end— is to have read the literature all the way through. Cy Twombly’s work is the work of a total reader. His work is a marginalia so amplified that the world itself—the sea, wars, grief, love— is all text, and any flat surface the margins to which he is compelled.

Reading is a process of the body, the object of a book or page in hand, words entering through the eyes, the entered words then creating impressions and sensations, these sensations then resulting in the reader’s gestures—now you move your eyes, now you have wanted something, now you turn the page, now you have felt, now you make a mark with your pen. Any gesture a reader makes is as biological and responsive as any other act of love, and Twombly’s work is to date that love’s—the readerly kind’s—most ardent and realized expression.

Many people who love poetry as much as Cy Twombly did can only approach the enormity of this love by making more poetry. To write more poetry always seems—at least to the poets I know—like a failed expression of love for poetry. A poet is always falling short of her poem, but Twombly bypassed the poet’s always surprised failure by knowing from the start that this failure is a precondition of this love. What Twombly did in the perfect face of poetry is gesture, again and again, in humble and perseverating devotion to an art that, of all of them, always exceeds itself. His gestures, like any lover’s, are evidence that he was moved, and moving, but beyond that love, he knew not toward what. And this space beyond knowing—what Keats once called “negative capability”—is the real site of any poem.

Cy Twombly’s is a response to poetry that could neither accept the degradations of making nothing from his love nor perform the hubris of pretending that poetry will ever live up to poetry. It is no wonder, then, that the poets love Cy Twombly, who seems at all times to stand both among us and apart from us. No matter how far Twombly’s practice gets dislocated from its roots in poetry by a marketplace that prefers to understand art in the diminishment of money and not in the amplitudes of love, every work by Cy Twombly is an irrefutable act of devotion to an art—poetry—that in its very substance repels this materiality.

cy twombly & the poets by anne boyer

ii

To read and to make nothing is to make a cathedral of oneself, the invisible kind that has no use for the general worship, points to no god but the one that is lost. That cathedral is fragile, always degrading, exhausting to repair, lost when a life is. To live quietly, inactive, and alone with all one’s hoarded reading is to live with a mind that is both alien and overcrowded, to exchange one’s thoughts for Homer’s or Keats’s, the dead poets always going on about Achilles or idleness or the sea.

To read and to make nothing, too, is to live in a lapsing ecology, all impressions out of balance, input and output disrupted, any possible equilibrium always impossible. To read and make nothing—no conversation, no further literature, no instruction, no notes—is to have only halfread, the necessarily transmutable untransmuted, all materials that exist most fully in their realization perpetually left unrealized.

But to read and make something—in Cy Twombly’s case an entire art, from beginning to end— is to have read the literature all the way through. Cy Twombly’s work is the work of a total reader. His work is a marginalia so amplified that the world itself—the sea, wars, grief, love— is all text, and any flat surface the margins to which he is compelled.

Reading is a process of the body, the object of a book or page in hand, words entering through the eyes, the entered words then creating impressions and sensations, these sensations then resulting in the reader’s gestures—now you move your eyes, now you have wanted something, now you turn the page, now you have felt, now you make a mark with your pen. Any gesture a reader makes is as biological and responsive as any other act of love, and Twombly’s work is to date that love’s—the readerly kind’s—most ardent and realized expression.

Many people who love poetry as much as Cy Twombly did can only approach the enormity of this love by making more poetry. To write more poetry always seems—at least to the poets I know—like a failed expression of love for poetry. A poet is always falling short of her poem, but Twombly bypassed the poet’s always surprised failure by knowing from the start that this failure is a precondition of this love. What Twombly did in the perfect face of poetry is gesture, again and again, in humble and perseverating devotion to an art that, of all of them, always exceeds itself. His gestures, like any lover’s, are evidence that he was moved, and moving, but beyond that love, he knew not toward what. And this space beyond knowing—what Keats once called “negative capability”—is the real site of any poem.

Cy Twombly’s is a response to poetry that could neither accept the degradations of making nothing from his love nor perform the hubris of pretending that poetry will ever live up to poetry. It is no wonder, then, that the poets love Cy Twombly, who seems at all times to stand both among us and apart from us. No matter how far Twombly’s practice gets dislocated from its roots in poetry by a marketplace that prefers to understand art in the diminishment of money and not in the amplitudes of love, every work by Cy Twombly is an irrefutable act of devotion to an art—poetry—that in its very substance repels this materiality.

cy twombly & the poets by anne boyer

ii

As official descriptor “plutonic ideal” ritual mourning receipts

of ephemeral agonies

I had just thought of you but was not so sweetly

acquiescent

to being a filter that mortality

strains though

distracted by women’s graves

as counterliterature

I considered

sending a picture

just to let you know we are corpses

for starters

Charon’s obol

bitcoins

iii

requiem by anne boyer

in the mouth

As official descriptor “plutonic ideal” ritual mourning receipts

of ephemeral agonies

I had just thought of you but was not so sweetly

acquiescent

to being a filter that mortality

strains though

distracted by women’s graves

as counterliterature

I considered

sending a picture

just to let you know we are corpses

for starters

Charon’s obol

bitcoins

iii

requiem by anne boyer

in the mouth

v

iv

first voice

second voice

Like a quince-apple

Like a hyacinth in

ripening on a top

The mountains, trampled

branch in a tree top

By shepherds until only a purple stain

not once noticed by harvesters or if not unnoticed, not reached lament for a maidenhead (fragment) by sappho translated by mary barnard, in sappho (university of california press, 1958)

remains on the ground

v

iv

first voice

second voice

Like a quince-apple

Like a hyacinth in

ripening on a top

The mountains, trampled

branch in a tree top

By shepherds until only a purple stain

not once noticed by harvesters or if not unnoticed, not reached lament for a maidenhead (fragment) by sappho translated by mary barnard, in sappho (university of california press, 1958)

remains on the ground

Hang iambics.

This is no time for poetry.

vi

fragment by archilochos translated by guy davenport, in archilochos, sappho, alkman (university of california press, 1980)

Hang iambics.

This is no time for poetry.

vi

fragment by archilochos translated by guy davenport, in archilochos, sappho, alkman (university of california press, 1980)

Now Is The Drinking Nunc est Bibendum When the gods leave do you think they hesitate, turn and make a farewell sign, some gesture of regret?

When they leave, music is loudest, sun high, stores fat with harvest and you, dizzy with wine, befuddled with well-being, sink into your body as though it were real, as if yours to keep.

You neither see their going nor hear their silence, you sleep, bereft of dreams in your good bed.

now is the drinking by patricia waters

vii

Now Is The Drinking Nunc est Bibendum When the gods leave do you think they hesitate, turn and make a farewell sign, some gesture of regret?

When they leave, music is loudest, sun high, stores fat with harvest and you, dizzy with wine, befuddled with well-being, sink into your body as though it were real, as if yours to keep.

You neither see their going nor hear their silence, you sleep, bereft of dreams in your good bed.

now is the drinking by patricia waters

vii

In Beauty it is finished

The pistil of the Peony Gushes out into the noonday Sunlight

52

navajo night chant (this line is from a prayer that is part of a nine-day navajo ceremony) viii

haiku by tan taigi

In Beauty it is finished

The pistil of the Peony Gushes out into the noonday Sunlight

52

navajo night chant (this line is from a prayer that is part of a nine-day navajo ceremony) viii

haiku by tan taigi

Quasi tutti gli scrittori di vero e squisito sentimentale, dipingendo la disperazione e lo scoraggiamento totale della vita, hanno cavato i colori dal proprio cuore.

english translation

Almost all writers of real feeling, in describing their despair and their total disenchantment, have drawn the colours from their own heart.

from zibaldone di pensieri (august 18–20, 1820) by giacomo leopardi translated by iris origo, in leopardi: a study in solitude (hamish hamilton, 1953)

ix

Quasi tutti gli scrittori di vero e squisito sentimentale, dipingendo la disperazione e lo scoraggiamento totale della vita, hanno cavato i colori dal proprio cuore.

english translation

Almost all writers of real feeling, in describing their despair and their total disenchantment, have drawn the colours from their own heart.

from zibaldone di pensieri (august 18–20, 1820) by giacomo leopardi translated by iris origo, in leopardi: a study in solitude (hamish hamilton, 1953)

ix

opening page: cy twombly, untitled, 1990, acrylic, wax crayon, and pencil on handmade paper, 30 ⅝ × 21 ⅝ inches (77.8 × 54.8 cm)

ii cy twombly, delian ode 25, 1961, pencil, colored pencil, wax crayon, and ballpoint pen on paper, 13 ⅛ × 13 ⅞ inches (33.4 × 35.2 cm) iii cy twombly, aristaeus mourning the loss of his bees, 1973, oil, wax crayon, and pencil on paper, 27 ⅝ × 39 ⅝ inches (70 × 100.5 cm) iv cy twombly, untitled (to sappho), 1976, oil, wax crayon, and pencil on paper, 59 1⁄6 × 53 ¼ inches (150 × 135.2 cm) v cy twombly, untitled (to sappho), 1976, oil, wax crayon, and pencil on paper, 58 ⅞ × 63 ¾ inches (149.6 × 162 cm) vi cy twombly, untitled, 1989, acrylic and pencil on paper, 30 × 22 ¼ inches (76 × 56.5 cm) vii cy twombly, coronation of sesostris (part vi), 2000, acrylic, paint stick, wax crayon, and lead pencil on canvas, 80 ¼ × 61 ¼ inches (203.7 × 155.6 cm) viii cy twombly, untitled (in beauty it is finished), 1983–2002, acrylic, wax crayon, pencil and pen on handmade paper in unbound handmade book of thirty-six pages ix cy twombly, untitled (to leopardi), 1988, oil, wax crayon, and pencil on paper, 55 × 38 ½ inches (139.7 × 97.8 cm) opposite: cy twombly, untitled (in beauty it is finished), 1983–2002 (detail), acrylic, wax crayon, pencil, and pen on handmade paper in unbound handmade book of thirty-six pages

all artwork © cy twombly foundation photos by rob mckeever “cy twombly & the poets” and “requiem” © anne boyer, 2018 “now is the drinking” © patricia waters, 1996

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