Plans for Sentences

by Renee Gladman

"These sentences―they―will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman's latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman's book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Genres: Poetry, Art, Writing

140 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2022

About the author

Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

Reviews

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 ‘These sentences will grow the field against the substrate in a theory of hills and they will spire’

15 ‘These sentences will balance the question of movement against that of enclosure, will slant the rise against the cleave, and will add a portal to what you’ve been saying. They will out and cleave’

19 ‘These sentences will have performed the dreams of sentences upon arrival’

45 ‘These sentences will grow grasses as the chapter ends and these grasses will signal the plain but also cut the substrate. Yet, the structure will hold. These will be the gaps’

59 ‘These sentences will form a sanctuary for refusal; they will fan out, they will awn and cleave a new scaffold’

93 ‘These sentences will dream themselves into a figuration of planets and satellites, looking to set value to variables beyond the science of the plain: the feeling of the unknown beside you’

119 ‘These sentences will constellate the territories of the poem’

from Acknowledgements
139 ‘At the same time, I started to wonder: What would future sentences look like and what would they do in a present that precedes their use or, at least, precedes the places to which they point? These are descriptions for future sentences, however the plans for those sentences (i.e., their actual futures) are still the drawings.’

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'These sentences will constellate the gears that alter your movements on weather; they will foment tiny gears of speech, clicking, turning, moating, and will be like the wind blowing thought back onto itself, behind itself so that thought moves by leaning forward

These sentences will have performed the dreams of sentences upon arrival

These moats will separate objects from subjects and preserve silence

They will set the world of the text in motion, diverting at the escapement, turning to void, and will make small bodies of sayings that will click and moat'

(from 'Fig. 9', p19)

[Noah Leventhal · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there were no limit on the number of stars I could give this book, I would give it a fucking galaxy

[Siani-Simone Ammons · Rating 2 out of 5]

read for a class presentation, i can appreciate it for its very innovative style and the intellectual risks it takes but besides that i would not pick it up for fun.

[Alia Shaukat · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautifullllll!!!!! gladman’s manifesto, breaking + rebuilding the world!!!! the asemic writing / art figures did so much in conjunction with the sentences

to grain, to blacken, to void <3

and don’t even get me started with when she incorporated the watercolor halfway thru …

[kirkesque · Rating 4 out of 5]

About nine years ago, I suffered a TBI that destroyed my ability to read, write, ride a bike, walk in a balanced manner, live in a healthy way. It was an extremely difficult time reaching the point of being able to do most of those things again. I walk differently still. I can't ride a bike. But I have relearned how to read and write. Not being able to write when you are a writer...? Among the lower rings of self-hell.

I mention that because this book triggered a lot of the broken record scratch static of the days that became weeks that turned into the months of nine years. Which is both a personal scream as well as a trepidatious quiet personal ovation to the author/artist.

Gladman's drawings are stunning and, for me with my neurological damage, artistically horrid. Some of the looping scrawls and claustrophobic scribbled favelas are painful for me to read, even at a glance. But I grok completely why they are so. And—not specifically painful for brain injured readers—they are supposed to be discomforting, harsh and brutal. Words and images ripping through perceptions.

I think if I had not suffered the disabling injury nine years ago, reading this work would have placed it a solid 3 or 3.5 star book. Seeing it through from the neurological trauma: 4.5.

Exquisite. I wonder if it could be incorporated into someone's therapeutic work with disabled people. I'd like to thank her for my being able to experience it.

[Lisa Bianca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very interested to read this book, given the promise of entwining text and image.
Was it the image that came first and then described? Or a description that led the pen?
Either way there is great written imagery accompanying the intriguing linear work.

These sentences will erase half of what they say ...
These sentences will round the slope and then lapse ...
These sentences will combine at dawn ...
... they will assume the energy of a dispersing hive ...
... will sonar the sea while the land mosses ...

Plans for Sentences is the latest from poet and artist Renee Gladman, and it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to view this DRC thanks to publisher Wave Books via Edelweiss.

[H]

struggled hard with the first half of this book, set it down for several months, just now finished it in one sitting. funny how the mind works like that. visually—stunning—the introduction of color is like a type of drama—when i was initially reading, i was frustrated by being unable to link sentence & image. i relaxed that urge upon coming back to it, and had a better time just thinking through the possibilities of sentences & places & & &

also? i don’t always need to know exactly what’s going on to have a good time. it opened a good door in my brain

[Dora Prieto · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up from the publisher at AWP in Kansas City, and have deeply loved coming back to it over and over throughout the months. It's a work that moves on many levels, visually via the illustrations, conceptually via the space between image and word on each page, even instructive in terms of craft at times, the expansiveness that arrives from defamiliarizing sentences. Plus the delight of the words, and the layers of politic so sharp yet expansive. So cool!!

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting approach to hybrid writing-drawing. I wish I could read *any* of the so-called sentences. I appreciate this book more as a blueprint for experiential experiments than as a work in itself. But even as the latter it offers a tantalizing entry into liminal, inchoate meaning—which can also be extremely frustrating!

[Jed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review tk in the Brooklyn Review

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"These sentences will dream themselves into a figuration of planets and satellites, looking to set value to variables beyond the science of the plain: the feeling of the unknown beside you" (93).

[Mayzie Sattler · Rating 4 out of 5]

a steinian experience, illustrated

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"these sentences will gather all the pauses into a flowing assembly, into a speech that is only the comma, and will hold time as it distills and blackens in equation" 🤍 , / , / , /

[Hannah Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

One-of-a-kind work with intersecting words and drawings and architecture. Inspiring.

[Melia Tessel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and so challenging. The future of poetry and what poetry can do is bright.

[Gracey Downer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m planning something that’s for sure…

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

magnificent, acute, almost sacrosanct

[tillie lefforge · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I think it’s a cool project and super fun to look at, but in terms of poetry collections, it is probably much longer than it needed to be