Talking With Lucy Ives About Madeline Gins: A Different Level of Experiment

Lucy Ives talks to Amelia Schonbek about The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, the new anthology of Gins's long out-of-print work, edited by Ives for Siglio Press. Ives discusses encountering Gins in her MFA days: "It seemed like, 'Oh maybe this person doesn’t understand that you’re supposed to write poems that will be published in literary magazines.' There was a sad version of me that was capable of that thought." More, from Bookforum:

Who were Gins’s fellow-experimenters? And did your sense of her writerly family tree shift as you spent time in her archives?

The most obvious person in that family tree is probably Gertrude Stein, who was interested in space and language in a very particular way, one often read as an extreme high-modernist stance. But scholarship has shown that it was a kind of secret language that she shared with Alice B. Toklas. So, her writing is part of a domestic practice. That’s also something important to think about with Gins. She was trying to figure out a way to have a productive, collective life that is not based on the nuclear family. As she was reimagining the association of people one grows and learns and works with—her writing was part of that as well.

But I think you can put Gins in the context of various experimental traditions. I put her with Hannah Weiner, who was a friend of hers. Weiner was also an underwear designer, and had a practice that wasn’t just writing poetry, but also involved performance and the fabrication of semiotic objects of various kinds. And I think about the poet Bernadette Mayer, and her sister Rosemary, who’s a visual artist and worked a lot with fabric. And there’s the artist, writer, and philosopher Adrian Piper.

She also fits in with writers who had experimental or very capacious conceptions of what the book object could be. I like thinking about Laurence Sterne—you know the black page in Tristram Shandy—in relation to WORD RAIN. The idea that the act of writing and the existence of the book can, in this kind of impossible twist, be folded into the narrative, so that the existence of the book is foreseen within the fiction, as well as the existence of the reader. That kind of reflexivity—what people now call metafiction. Once we start thinking about Gins that way, we can fit her into the American tradition at a different level of experiment, along with what I think of as a group of men who’ve been taken very seriously.

Read on at Bookforum. Read Lucy Ives's introduction to a folio of Madeline Gins's work published in the April issue of Poetry, here.