I entered without words

Poems

Jody Gladding

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780691238968
  9780691238951
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691238975
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

An innovative and inviting book of poems about the places where language and landscape converge

In this strongly visual and environmentally engaged collection, award-winning poet and translator Jody Gladding explores landscape as a source of language in lyrics that operate as physical acts in three-dimensional space.

Composed and printed in a landscape format, these minimal, quiet, playful, meditative, and open-ended poems are experimental in form and inviting in subject. Drawing inspiration from poets like A. R. Ammons, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Jean Valentine, and visual artists like Ann Hamilton, Roni Horn, and Cecilia Vicuña, Gladding discovers exciting spatial possibilities within the page itself by exploiting white space and varying typefaces. As the page opens into the compositional field that Mallarmé, Ponge, and others conceived it to be, words constellate around bolded through lines to offer multiple, interwoven meanings, interacting with each other and the reader, who moves freely among them, to make poems that are spatial, nonlinear, and different with each reading. And, adding yet another dimension to the collection, many of the poems have facing-page French versions.

"Landscape-oriented" in every sense, I entered without words is an ambitious, innovative, and striking collection by a major poet.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• the mother tongue licked me into being
• that mare sometimes appeared
• l’eau se fait calme quelquefois
• now silent becomes listen
• have I attended the birds
• la montagne reflète la blessure
• swallows light in the open
• what kind of quest is this
• I like having nothing
• guest bed
• on this green live languages graze
• morning in a fog
• I still believe in the dark work of idleness
• call it harvest
• this heart of summer gleams
• who is the girl I push so high
• qui est la fille que je pousse si haut
• messy eater
• our young register damage in radiant flesh
• je quitte la maison d’être en plein vent du ciel
• unhinged I left the house to wind
• in my sickness the sky kept spinning
• what it means to be reduced
• space is not matter
• the poor hide what they can
• who cooks for you awwwlll
• ribs were the first rafters
• your hand opens to wave
• dark was the night cold was the ground
• the stone vault singing
• la chapelle en pierre chantant
• that light out of darkness may rise
• over your cities the grasses will grow
• an artist’s best friend is time boredom sway
• is art the idling silence
• à l’art aigu de roche et ange
• merci pour ces très belles ratures
• thank you for your very beautiful cross-outs
• why everything beautiful hurts
• pourquoi toutes les belles choses piquent
• lost in lit screens the readers with their books
• look back at me my love belong here
• last goose
• dernière oie
• a deficiency hollows places
• out of nowhere snow
• paper white
• a stiff wind makes them more beautiful
• la mort n’a pas arasé l’espérance de la neige
• death has not eroded hope of snow
• I seek the cold mountain spring
• je cherche le motif glacé
• to knock with gentle barbarism
• trouver la porte frapper entrer
• des herbes folles
• wild grasses
• the white flame sank offering only the gesture
• ôté de la flamme elle lisait fumait
• le vent s’arrache de la langue maternelle exprimetout
• wind wrenches free her tongue
• every being constitutes a probe employed in a newdirection