Introduction: Madeline Gins’s “Transformatory Power”

Could we think of the act of reading as creative—in the same sense in which we tend to view the act of writing as creative? Could the act of reading even be considered synonymous with writing?

In his essay on the death of the author, Roland Barthes describes literature as a “tissue of citations” that refers back to an unknowable number of contexts and referents, rather than a monographic masterpiece, the meaning of which is exhaustively foreseen by a god-like author. The author’s “death,” whether provoked by Barthes’s essay or not, invites a view of literary writing as collaborative. For Barthes, reading and writing cannot be cleanly separated out, cannot be understood as absolutely distinct activities or roles.

But we hardly need look as far as 1967 (the date of the first publication of Barthes’s essay, in the American art-world magazine Aspen) to note 
writing’s dual nature. As our society has become increasingly, and more intently and intensely, mediated online we read and write, write and read, mobilizing packets of data, leaving trails of our locations, activities, preferences, putative selves. We write to read, performing text-based searches, attempting to compose ourselves from contents gleaned from unfathomably capacious databases. Hal Varian, who joined Google as a consultant in 2002, said of the company’s view of human presence on and around its platforms: “Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.” In a digital context, there is no grand difference: distinctions among media types are flattened by code, save for the end user; like writing, in this context reading necessarily produces a “signal,” but not necessarily semantic or symbolic meaning. It is an interesting predicament and also a question of poetics.

But to return, again, to the past: long before the internet as we know it existed, back in the days of ARPANET (established in 1969), a poet living on the northern edge of the industrial lower-Manhattan neighborhood lately dubbed “SoHo” with her husband and collaborator, the painter Shūsaku Arakawa, began composing a style of poem deeply invested in a collaborative literary production, concerned with an activated space between poet and reader. Madeline Gins typed—and wrote by hand, and sometimes drew—poems and other experimental scripts that preceded and intervened between her first two books, 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) and What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984). She later collected these pages into a folder she, or someone else, labeled “Transformatory Power,” or “Trans-P,” for short. Although this collection was never published, the work is strange and astounding.

Gins (1941–2014)—born in the Bronx, raised on Long Island, and subsequently a lifelong New York City resident—is perhaps best known for the speculative architecture firm, Reversible Destiny, that she and Arakawa founded in 1987. Via this organization, the collaborative duo designed and oversaw the realization of structures they believed had the capacity to stave off death, including lofts in Tokyo, a park in Yoro, Japan, and a house in East Hampton. With this work, as well as in various co-authored texts, they attempted to make the case that human acculturation leads to a dulling of the senses and, consequently, human mortality is due to a lack of sensorial stimulation and perceptual challenge.

The selection of Gins’s early, previously unpublished poems that follows takes us back to the mid-sixties and seventies, a time before Reversible Destiny. Yet in these writings we see a related concern: through tactics of accumulation and replacement, Gins encourages the reader to discover what words will do once they have been stripped bare of grammar. A list provides structure and a kind of time, without the hierarchies of grammatical sense. Lists are associative and sometimes freeing, playful. They produce a sense of possibility and entailment, as in “ghosting,” included here: if  “-1. on the subway,” then “1. imbroglio.” In other words, the plot thickens and thickens, line by line—and, significantly, this plot can only be composed with the reader’s participation.

These previously unpublished poems, along with other out-of-print titles by Gins, are collected in The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, released by Siglio Press this month. This portfolio reproduces numerous poems in facsimile to show not just how Gins revised her work, but how she read it and what she was reading into it, with her marks, lines, adjustments. As an editor, I wondered if Gins might not have seen her writing as image as much as language or text, and so I wanted to give the reader access to that possibility as well.