In the 1960s] Madeline Gins… was exploring states of extreme influence, even possession, by literary language. Her way of “deal[ing] with” the displacement of her self by an influx of words was to write in the very space of delay and estrangement that reading and writing produce, to continue this delay, this interruption. She seemed truly not to aspire to any sort of fixed meaning—or, rather, to aspire to unfixing meaning—even as she was quite insistent that she wrote in the novel form. — Lucy Ives
Madeline Gins was marooned here, on Earth, and made the best of it, using what was available to her, like words. This book is a splendid testament to how far she pushed them, and us, to realize what she already knew. That this, all this, is not it. Not. Even. Close. — Paul Chan
The new anthology THE SADDEST THING IS THAT I HAVE HAD TO USE WORDS: A MADELINE GINS READER—published by Siglio—”brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins’ WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) (1969), 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 Long out of print or unpublished, Gins’s poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics.”*
See link below for details.
THE SADDEST THING IS THAT I HAVE HAD TO USE WORDS: A MADELINE GINS READER, edited and with an introduction by Lucy Ives (Catskill, NY: Siglio Press, 2020).*
From top: Madeline Gins in Tokyo, 1998, image courtesy and © the Reversible Destiny Foundation; Arakawa and Gins, Study for Critical Holder, 1990, image courtesy and © 2018 the Estate of Madeline Gins; Gins, Untitled, n.d.; Gins, Untitled, 1969, published in the Street Works edition of 0 TO 9; The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, edited by Lucy Ives, image courtesy and © Siglio Press; Arakawa and Gins, Screen-Valve, 1985–1987, image courtesy and © 2018 the Estate of Madeline Gins; Gins, 2007. Images courtesy and © the Reversible Destiny Foundation Archives.
