Ekphrasis of Tony Conrad’s “Four Violins”
“Painting with Green Center” (1913), Vasily Kandinsky. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
In the foreground,
this chain saw
tears and rips.
[PUSH]
Jagged tooth
blade, oscillates
up/down not pulsing,
[PULL]
but stabbing. Leave here
for the ocean
in the distance,
[PUSH]
cohered from excess.
On one thin
veneering sheet,
[PULL]
a rowboat pumps
its oars in circles,
the waves bob
[PUSH]
up/down/up, one motion.
A futile gesture to find
quiet. The saw still tears
[PULL]
away. If Sisyphus finally
reached the top,
he would not find calm,
[PUSH]
only the high screech
of the seagulls
who beat him there.
Ryan Riffenburgh
Publab Fellow 2025
Ryan Riffenburgh is a writer and musician based in Los Angeles with a degree in Literary Studies and Creative Writing from UCLA. His work explores how language fractures under pressure—how literature documents instability, erasure, and the unknowable. He’s interested in the shifting role of authorship, the instability of the subject, and the tension between form and content in the contemporary literary landscape. His current projects combine poetic and critical strategies, treating the page as a site of performance, failure, and persistence. His writing has appeared in Westwind Journal, The Big One, X-Ray Mag, and elsewhere.