CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/3/2021

In Siglio's Madeline Gins Reader, the plot thickens and thickens, line by line, item by item

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we're looking back at The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, a 2020 critic's pick at Publishers Weekly, Frieze, Design Observer and on the Poetry Foundation website, to name just a few. Published by Siglio and edited by Lucy Ives, it's a bookseller favorite too, collecting poems, experimental prose and previously unpublished work by transdisciplinary writer, artist and thinker Madeline Gins, normally best known for her “Reversible Destiny” architecture, produced in collaboration with her husband, the artist Arakawa. Ives calls "GHOSTING" one of the most intriguing poems in Gins's Trans-P series, drawing parallels with the "schematic, recursive poems the artist Dan Graham was making around the same time, in the late 1960s, with the significant difference that while Graham was engaged in a sort of war of attrition with respect to meaning and context, Gins’s list poems invite infinite additions of meaning and context… Gins does not reduce words to their grammatical functions but rather encourages the reader to discover along with her what words will do, once they have been stripped bare of grammar. This is, after all, the affordance of a list: it provides structure and a kind of time, without resorting to the hierarchies of grammar-based sense. Lists are associative and sometimes freeing, playful. They also cannot help but evoke the deductive logic of a philosophical syllogism, an effect exploited by Gins to produce a sense of possibility and entailment in the poems of Trans-P, something along the lines of, if '-1. ON THE SUBWAY,' then, '1. IMBROGLIO.' In other words, the plot thickens and thickens, line by line, item by item."