Deborah Meadows reads through Herman Melville's masterpiece, riffing off its concerns, but rendering them in utterly contemporary terms. Her questions, like Melville's, are both physical and metaphysical: "What and where is the mind? / Inscribed upon, see through / a brittle clarity, read through spectacles / that make a skin / over skin." Meadows teaches at Cal-Poly Pomona and is the author of forthcoming books of poems from Green Integer and Krupskaya.

The 6O's and 70's: From "The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick"

Literature & Fiction

Meadows, Deborah

Poetry

Tinfish Press

<p>Poetry. Imitative, a string of vocables made for city traffic, a coat, a liturgy of walking with crowds, a sentence opens with familiar weight as if naming television examples of bathos can save portent from the problem of induction. A scholar's flight pattern was called in, the commercial pilot received approval set off.</p>

Growing Still

Depleted Burden Down

Poetry. Here is a poetry that explores the promise of public speech. What might we hear in poems that ask: if communities are built with weathered words, what is the sort of discernment that translation makes elusive? Public and private, Deborah Meadows's poems ask "what provokes us to step toward the podium and begin a primary language game."

Factory School

A Los Angeles-based play, Guide Dogs rejects the triad of smog, traffic, and earthquakes for an exploration of reading and interpretation through civic unrest at city hall, the texts of LA figures (literary critic Marjorie Perloff and social critic Mike Davis), and the “Lightning Field” by Walter de Maria.  Some Cars, an embodiment, holds out against “the architecture of containment,” inflecting the hard surface of Kienholz’s art in a drive to uncover tragic action deferred through a small windshield, imperfectly.  Speech Acts with Trees is an inside-out Western that takes apart “narrow specializations with commanding views,” landscape tradition and conquest. Is a parable of sacrifice an obsolete railroad by the time conventional knowledge sets up shop in the “new” town? Are these Three Plays really one play along a topological fold?  *  “Meadows brings a rare musicality to her writing for the stage, and her eye for the telling discontinuities of contemporary life animates these plays with vivid and unsettling tensions.”  —Guy Zimmerman, artistic director, Padua Playwrights   “Wry and observant, Deborah Meadows' ambivalent oracles and philosopher-clowns seek "a nourishing shape that one could live in without tiring of its perimeter", but find just as readily an anthroposcenic welter, marked by false flags and the untidy promise of myriad revolutions – each adjacent, reluctant, and imperfectly contained.”  —Andrew Maxwell, Poetic Research Bureau director, Candor is the Brightest Shield author   “A philosophical autopsy performed on the event horizon of a perpetually collapsing world made language. Painstaking yet abandoned, Meadows teases language to spill its secrets, cracking a harrowing case: this.”  —Juli Crockett, playwright, lead singer of the Evangenitals  *

Three Plays

Dramas & Plays

BlazeVOX Books

Deborah Meadows grew up in Buffalo, NY in a working class family, attended SUNY-Buffalo, and worked in a factory. After graduation in 1977 she moved west to work in a poverty program. Then she ended up as an emerita faculty member in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University.  She moves from Buffalo, with an acute class consciousness based on her working class roots, to California and the world of higher education. But her books of poetry and strange plays and profound reflections appear from a publisher back home in Buffalo!  So give thanks to God that there’s a literate, artistic, class-conscious theoretician teaching in California.  In this book of daring and almost impossible plays and poetry you can look over her shoulder as she reads and thinks widely: from bipedalism to regime deferral, from Sophocles to sedatives, from Calvino to Claymation, from Michael Fried to Sigmund Freud, from Leo and Hercules (a pair of literate chimpanzees) to Niedecker and Zukofsky. And of course there’s still room for humor: Twin sisters speak: Fetch: When you see him, kick him in the balls! Kinsan-G: Not me! There’s an app for that. Sure there is. But kick him in the balls nonetheless.  —John Tranter, poet    In Deborah Meadows’ The Demotion of Pluto runs of poetry bleed into plays. The title play recasts Sophocles’ Philoctetes; Obstacle Plays riffs on Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood that considers minimalist sculpture as both theatrical and an obstacle; and Nothing to Do works intensive differences between brilliant and crumbling minds situated in the aftermath of street struggle.

The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays

Lecture Notes: A duration poem in twelve parts

History & Criticism

Poetry. The bass guitar creates patterns that make music into a visceral experience—they are what infect the body. The poems in TRANSLATION: THE BASS ACCOMPANIMENT—SELECTED POEMS are in dialog with other authors, and here, experimental poetry engages logician Quine, encyclopedic novelist Melville, philosophers Irigaray and Deleuze, theologian and synthetic philosopher Aquinas, poets Dragomoshchenko, Hejinian, Raworth, Baudelaire, and Celan, Soviet cinematographer Vertov, video artist Bill Viola, and others.Many have written of the mediated experience that language, private life, and civic life involve. In that spirit, the poetry engages the syntax of exploratory thought from ten earlier books brought together here for the first time and ends with a poem that hints at a version of tomorrow.

Translation: the bass accompaniment--Selected Poems

Shearsman Books

Neo-bedrooms

In Representing Absence (winner of the 2004 Gertrude Stein Award) Deborah Meadows draws on a practice of poetry composition as palimpsest: writing on top, or through, other writing, she evokes writers such as Baudelaire, Melville in the excerpts from “The Theory of Subjectivity in MobyDick,” Dante, and video artist, Bill Viola.Deborah Meadows teaches at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona, and has been part of recent writers’ and scholars’ exchanges with Havana.

Representing Absence (Green Integer)

Green Integer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Meadows, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Meadows, Deborah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Meadows, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The 6O's and 70's: From "The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick"

Growing Still

Depleted Burden Down

Depleted Burden Down

Three Plays

The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays

Lecture Notes: A duration poem in twelve parts

Translation: the bass accompaniment--Selected Poems

Neo-bedrooms

Representing Absence (Green Integer)