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The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader
A revelatory anthology of poems, experimental prose and previously unpublished work by Madeline Gins, the transdisciplinary writer-artist-thinker famed for her “Reversible Destiny” architecture Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings―in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries―represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page.
The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins’ 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) , along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins’ poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.
Born in the Bronx and long a resident of New York City, Madeline Gins (1941–2014) participated in experimental artistic and literary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s before developing a collaborative practice as a philosopher and architect. Alongside her own writing, Gins collaborated with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on a theory of “procedural architecture,” an endeavor to create buildings and environments that would prevent human death.
The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins’ 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) , along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins’ poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.
Born in the Bronx and long a resident of New York City, Madeline Gins (1941–2014) participated in experimental artistic and literary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s before developing a collaborative practice as a philosopher and architect. Alongside her own writing, Gins collaborated with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on a theory of “procedural architecture,” an endeavor to create buildings and environments that would prevent human death.
- GenresPoetry
327 pages, Paperback
Published April 21, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 27, 2024
MADELINE GINS (1941-2014) was an artist, architect, and writer. I had not heard of heard before coming across her name and a citation of this book in the endnote to Kate Briggs's The Long Form; just being cited by Briggs made Gins a person of interest for me, but it also made a difference that Lucy Ives, a writer I have long followed, had put the collection together. So, what have we here?
Gins published several books in collaboration with her husband and partner, Shusaku Arakawa, and another four on her own. The Saddest Thing reprints the entirety of her first book, Word Rain (in facsimile, no less), and substantial excerpts from What the President Will Say and Do!! and Helen Keller, or Arakawa, together with some early poems and essays.
Although I am among the world’s leading skippers of introductions, I read Lucy Ives’s introduction to the volume because….well, Lucy Ives. Her account of finding Word Rain in the University of Iowa Library inspired flashbacks of some of my own favorite finds in the less frequented shelves in the “P” stacks (or 800s in the Dewey decimal system). She also makes the useful suggestion that what Gins is up to make overlap with what the Language poets were doing.
That suggestion led to my own guess at what the title Word Rain means. Language is like weather in that it is the ground of almost everything we do, a universal condition in which in which our lives inevitably take place, the always-already-there thing so omnipresent that we may not always notice it. Language creates the context in which our lives occur, as weather does (as, for example, rain or its absence does).
The structure of our language tells us things about the world even prior to anything semantic—prior, that is, to our knowing what a word means. If someone says, “I snarfled today, and I plan to snarfle tomorrow,” we know that “snarfle” is an action one can perform, even if we do not what it is. We could even pose questions like, “Is it okay to snarfle on an empty stomach?” without even knowing what “snarfling” is.
The structure of our language allows us to make perfectly grammatical, coherent statements contrary to fact, such as the Kafka’s famous one about Gregor Samsa waking up and finding himself a bug, and even statements that are literally impossible, like Chomsky’s famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Using the possibilities of syntax to generate statements without regard to what is actually existing, to what is even possible, could get us into the realm of the surrealists, such as “Hairy buildings ponder equanimity annually.”
Even though such statements do not correspond to any actuality, even any possible actuality, they might have a certain meaningfulness, as though they might be true in some sense, or might have some kind of utopian projection in them. We naturally look for meaning in statements, and so we might speculate about the spiritual lives of hairy buildings. And if a writer places such statements in a sequence, we start to assume they are or could be a meaningful sequence, a narrative.
That language cannot actually reliably deliver to us the truth about the world may induce anxiety, even a sense of tragedy, but we have little in the way of alternatives. It’s sad that we have to rely on something so unreliable as words, as Gins notes in the sentence Ives repurposed as the book’s title. It’s certainly healthy to be made to understand this particular deficit in our shared situation, however.
Word Rain gets us thinking about how syntax generates meaning by leaving blank spaces in the middle of sentences, gets us thinking about how two sentences are points that we assume will define a line, gets us thinking about how the relation between language and the real is always up for grabs. It participates in many of the same tricks that a lot of 20th century avant-garde writing was trafficking in, but it’s a great deal more fun that most of the other examples. It takes its games seriously, but doesn’t get too painfully earnest and beetle-browed or götterdammerung about it.
Much of the excerpt from What the President Will Say and Do!! is all-caps declarations such as "FILL THE OCEAN WITH COTTON!" and "USE FIRE AS A PULLEY." The nifty thing about the declarations is that one can (1) read them as being in the imperative mode, in that the President will order his administration to fill the ocean with cotton or urge the citizenry to use fire as a pulley, or (2) read them as being in the indicative mode, preceded by an implied "The President will," as in "[The President will] fill the ocean with cotton" or "[The President will] use fire as a pulley." Thus, any of the declarations could be about something the President will say OR something the President will do.
Either way, saying or doing, supposedly matters immensely, the President being our chief executive, but at the same time all the statements occur within the structures of English, and thus (as in Word Rain) can be clear and meaningful yet have no reliable or guaranteed relationship to actuality, to the world of observable phenomena. Language's structure permits one to state plainly and unambiguously that one wishes the ocean filled with cotton, or that one intends to fill the ocean with cotton, without any regard at all for the sheer impossibility of the thing. That language lets us conceptualize the impossible may be important.
In the May 2024 edition of Poetry, Lisa Jarnot wrote of one day writing some lines in which she felt she lifted clear of the goals she had originally set for her own poetry, i.e., "to SAY SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING, and GO SOMEWHERE! to get at the empathy I had for the world and to pour out my own feeling states." The lines she had just written (which wound up in "Triptych") did not seem to issue from her design or intentions or any kind of purposefulness, but to be a kind of "revelation": "It was not about what I was trying to make the poem say but about what the poem was trying to make me say."
I think What the President Will Say and Do!! similarly juggles with the idea that our saying and doing, our going somewhere, may benefit from lifting clear of the our own intentions and designs, our own sense of the possible, and language's infinite versatility can help lift us...if we let it.
Ives also includes three chapters from Gins's Helen Keller or Arakawa, in which Gins sets some of her husband's artworks in relation to Keller's own discussions of her perceptual apparatus, which gets into the bigger question of what the imagination owes the senses. I can't tell for ceratan whether Gins had read Helen Keller's The World I Live In, but I bet she had. Probably Diderot's Lettre sur les Aveugles too.
The book is a delight, mainly, with some unnerving moments and some startling insights, like a good psychedelic. Props to Lucy Ives for editing and getting Gins's texts back in circulation.
Gins published several books in collaboration with her husband and partner, Shusaku Arakawa, and another four on her own. The Saddest Thing reprints the entirety of her first book, Word Rain (in facsimile, no less), and substantial excerpts from What the President Will Say and Do!! and Helen Keller, or Arakawa, together with some early poems and essays.
Although I am among the world’s leading skippers of introductions, I read Lucy Ives’s introduction to the volume because….well, Lucy Ives. Her account of finding Word Rain in the University of Iowa Library inspired flashbacks of some of my own favorite finds in the less frequented shelves in the “P” stacks (or 800s in the Dewey decimal system). She also makes the useful suggestion that what Gins is up to make overlap with what the Language poets were doing.
That suggestion led to my own guess at what the title Word Rain means. Language is like weather in that it is the ground of almost everything we do, a universal condition in which in which our lives inevitably take place, the always-already-there thing so omnipresent that we may not always notice it. Language creates the context in which our lives occur, as weather does (as, for example, rain or its absence does).
The structure of our language tells us things about the world even prior to anything semantic—prior, that is, to our knowing what a word means. If someone says, “I snarfled today, and I plan to snarfle tomorrow,” we know that “snarfle” is an action one can perform, even if we do not what it is. We could even pose questions like, “Is it okay to snarfle on an empty stomach?” without even knowing what “snarfling” is.
The structure of our language allows us to make perfectly grammatical, coherent statements contrary to fact, such as the Kafka’s famous one about Gregor Samsa waking up and finding himself a bug, and even statements that are literally impossible, like Chomsky’s famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Using the possibilities of syntax to generate statements without regard to what is actually existing, to what is even possible, could get us into the realm of the surrealists, such as “Hairy buildings ponder equanimity annually.”
Even though such statements do not correspond to any actuality, even any possible actuality, they might have a certain meaningfulness, as though they might be true in some sense, or might have some kind of utopian projection in them. We naturally look for meaning in statements, and so we might speculate about the spiritual lives of hairy buildings. And if a writer places such statements in a sequence, we start to assume they are or could be a meaningful sequence, a narrative.
That language cannot actually reliably deliver to us the truth about the world may induce anxiety, even a sense of tragedy, but we have little in the way of alternatives. It’s sad that we have to rely on something so unreliable as words, as Gins notes in the sentence Ives repurposed as the book’s title. It’s certainly healthy to be made to understand this particular deficit in our shared situation, however.
Word Rain gets us thinking about how syntax generates meaning by leaving blank spaces in the middle of sentences, gets us thinking about how two sentences are points that we assume will define a line, gets us thinking about how the relation between language and the real is always up for grabs. It participates in many of the same tricks that a lot of 20th century avant-garde writing was trafficking in, but it’s a great deal more fun that most of the other examples. It takes its games seriously, but doesn’t get too painfully earnest and beetle-browed or götterdammerung about it.
Much of the excerpt from What the President Will Say and Do!! is all-caps declarations such as "FILL THE OCEAN WITH COTTON!" and "USE FIRE AS A PULLEY." The nifty thing about the declarations is that one can (1) read them as being in the imperative mode, in that the President will order his administration to fill the ocean with cotton or urge the citizenry to use fire as a pulley, or (2) read them as being in the indicative mode, preceded by an implied "The President will," as in "[The President will] fill the ocean with cotton" or "[The President will] use fire as a pulley." Thus, any of the declarations could be about something the President will say OR something the President will do.
Either way, saying or doing, supposedly matters immensely, the President being our chief executive, but at the same time all the statements occur within the structures of English, and thus (as in Word Rain) can be clear and meaningful yet have no reliable or guaranteed relationship to actuality, to the world of observable phenomena. Language's structure permits one to state plainly and unambiguously that one wishes the ocean filled with cotton, or that one intends to fill the ocean with cotton, without any regard at all for the sheer impossibility of the thing. That language lets us conceptualize the impossible may be important.
In the May 2024 edition of Poetry, Lisa Jarnot wrote of one day writing some lines in which she felt she lifted clear of the goals she had originally set for her own poetry, i.e., "to SAY SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING, and GO SOMEWHERE! to get at the empathy I had for the world and to pour out my own feeling states." The lines she had just written (which wound up in "Triptych") did not seem to issue from her design or intentions or any kind of purposefulness, but to be a kind of "revelation": "It was not about what I was trying to make the poem say but about what the poem was trying to make me say."
I think What the President Will Say and Do!! similarly juggles with the idea that our saying and doing, our going somewhere, may benefit from lifting clear of the our own intentions and designs, our own sense of the possible, and language's infinite versatility can help lift us...if we let it.
Ives also includes three chapters from Gins's Helen Keller or Arakawa, in which Gins sets some of her husband's artworks in relation to Keller's own discussions of her perceptual apparatus, which gets into the bigger question of what the imagination owes the senses. I can't tell for ceratan whether Gins had read Helen Keller's The World I Live In, but I bet she had. Probably Diderot's Lettre sur les Aveugles too.
The book is a delight, mainly, with some unnerving moments and some startling insights, like a good psychedelic. Props to Lucy Ives for editing and getting Gins's texts back in circulation.
January 5, 2021
The title is true and her response is both opaque to me and yet filled with inventiveness and humor. I can’t say what she was doing but I had a fun time watching her do it.
September 17, 2024
Solid collection of very eccentric, daringly experimental prose - love the strange dippings-of-the-toes into speculative/science fiction alongside moments of art criticism, really odd and memorable stuff. Word Rain is obviously the meat of this particular book, but the other included excerpts of Gins' work are quite interesting too, and while I think the introduction could probably stand to have been chunked out into a few separate essays - it's an introduction, but also a work of criticism on work the reader is about to encounter presumably for the first time and a personal reflection on what the work means to the editor - "too dense of a good, helpful introduction" is a pretty good biggest problem to have with an edition of such opaque work.
dnf
November 28, 2024unfinished for most of the year...finally accepted my failure and mark this as DNF...
on one of the pages where I had given up trying to decipher this book I had scribbled: "This book: wayward, pretentious,...unconquerable." bye
on one of the pages where I had given up trying to decipher this book I had scribbled: "This book: wayward, pretentious,...unconquerable." bye
March 14, 2023
A new all-time fav.
August 16, 2024
Changed me wowwowo WORD RAIN and the list poems <3
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews