Jacket2

why letter ellipses begins for me in the slippery enigma of its title which, through the touch of a gerund to a gerund-esque, yields a kind of aspect perception, where shifts in emphasis can flicker ducks into rabbits. Stressing “letter” as that which can “ellipses,” I hear a desire to explore how speech slides into omission, how text erodes into cracks, gaps, full-blown sinkholes. Conversely, stressing “ellipses” as that which can be “lettered,” I hear a critical question about historiography and its limits: Why write or label what’s been left out?

For me, that tension between poetry, writing, and drawing is utterly captivating. So much so that I have spent the last two years writing poems that enter into conversations with Twombly’s work, a project I have found both humbling and transformative. In fact, the last real public outing I engaged in before the pandemic lockdown was a visit to the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston.