I entered without words by Jody Gladding

I entered without words is comprised of “landscape-oriented” poems, in which drops of one or two words are spread across the page. The poems have a very singular look that’s neither “concrete” (the shapes are still determined by syntax, inviting you to start at the top left of the page and read left to right) nor “Projective” (that’s too determined by the “breath” of a subject). There are some similarities to ideograms, but ideograms are not alphabetic and are a kind of “brushstroke.”

 

Some of the words are printed in bold type. Gladding states that these are entry points into the field of each poem. So, for example, one might read “in my sickness the sky kept spinning” in the following poem, but the idea is to also range across the poem and read other possibilities:

When I go over this poem, I also read a statement of being “amazed at how all that could be firmament kept spinning.” All that is firmament is actually spinning, at the atomic level. You also need to spin flax to create linen thread, another chain of one-word particles that are in the vicinity of each another in the field. What’s especially interesting about that, though, is the way that a flax “particle” is in different states simultaneously, both as flax (seed) as well as thread. 

 

The capacity to perceive different states of a particle (word) all in the same field, at the same time, is partly an effort to capture the way perception actually happens. You can only look at one thing at a time, and yet many things in a single field are available to be perceived. Besides what you see in a given moment, there are ten thousand things happening.

This is clear in a poem like “now silent becomes listen,” in which a bird’s flight from a branch at the poet’s approach results in perceiving both “a show of feathers” at the same time as “a green branch shaking.” The poem also leaves enough space for that branch to ultimately “compose ... itself”: 

There’s also something being said about the act of writing. Lines of poetry, which (at least in my opinion) come when they want to, enfold a variety of possible directions and next lines. Rather than whittle them down into a crafted poem, Gladding leaves the possibilities in. Composing itself is composed, with no specific direction ultimately prioritized above another that happened while writing. And, in a way, the poems are still being composed, no longer by Gladding but by those who are reading them, like a graphic score. 

On that latter note, Gladding states that the “landscape-orientation” of the poems makes it “so that reading itself becomes a physical act in the physical world.” This isn’t just post-structuralist mumbo-jumbo but an accurate statement about what happens when you read them: you “act” upon the available words, choosing a direction, revisiting or ignoring specific parts of the work. In “What I Mean by Landscape Orientation,” Gladding compares landscape orientation to portrait orientation, revealing an important valence to “physical world”: “here is where landscape orientation becomes a poetics. Because our literature, like our painting, has favored ‘portrait orientation,’ the human drama foregrounded, distinct from the natural world. How to reorient?” The physical world in which the reader “acts,” therefore, is not separate from the reader, nor is it the space of their own consciousness. Instead, it’s the whole of the landscape in which both reader and “everything else” mutually arise: “the endless interactions between the contradictory and coupled energies of yin and yang, from which the human is not separate but within, in this world, among the mountains and the waters.”

Gladding writes:

“I like having nothing” may refer to a humble, pious lifestyle, where delight is taken from sights of the spinning sky. Another possibility is to read “I like my thoughts having nothing to do with me,” and another still is “leaves dripping out here thin clouds having nothing to do with me.” The relationship between portrait-oriented me is blown away by the stream of thoughts, the thin clouds present after a rainstorm, the total flow to which clouds, thoughts, moss, crickets, Gladding, et. al. belong. Writing poetry would then be a way to make contact with something other than “me,” not to gain a fresh perspective on my situation but to remember to join back up with the total flow, the constant composing and recomposing of which is singularly captured by these poems.